A couple of nights ago, I met a few friends for dinner at what may be my favorite restaurant in Santo Domingo – this little two-room place which is painted a startlingly orange-red and serves the best falafel I have ever eaten. I’m normally pretty take-it-or-leave-it when it comes to falafel, which is why the first time I ate there I almost ordered the shawarma, which I generally like a lot more. I’m so glad I didn’t. This falafel is the kind of entrée that makes you feel that calories spent eating anything else are for the most part wasted.

After dinner we walked a few blocks to Parque Duarte, to sit in the cool 85 degree night air on a classic Latin-American-park bench and drink rum and cokes out of styrofoam cups filled with ice at the closest colmado. I’m pretty much in love with Latin American park culture – it is something I feel innately attracted to, something that just feels completely right. I love the people watching and the intersection of all parts of life, I love the way that sitting languorously in the park is seen as almost purposeful. Parque Duarte is definitely not Santo Domingo’s prettiest or most popular or most atmospheric park, but it is quite special and unique nonetheless, because it is the haven for the “alternative” kids.

Santo Domingo, as an extension of Dominican culture and maybe Latin American culture generally, is not a place that fosters or even tolerates much in the way of deviation from the norm. As a result, if you are not a über-typical young adult, that is to say, if you are not fanatical about baseball and clearly demonstrative of your heterosexuality as a man, if you do not adhere to the ultra feminine, flashy, and tight fashions sported by all the young ladies, then you may find yourself in an extremely small minority, living in a city which will shun you if it does not loudly and widely condemn you. As a result, the “alternative” kids are a much smaller group than the analogous group in say, New York, or even Trenton for that matter (I would guess, from my very unscientific method of observation and computation), and they gather in little Parque Duarte, each different group staking out a bench or two a representation of a category; the gay kids, the rasta kids with their dreads and their weed, the artsy girls with short hair and baggy jeans.

Now, this being a recognized park with benches and trees in a Latin American city, the edges of all parts of society spill over, even when deterred by such difference. There is the handful of drunks who slowly become intoxicated enough to begin their proclamations, loudly prophesizing to no one in particular, and the overflow from two colmados which sit on the park, men in plastic chairs crowded into the small one-room centers of Dominican life. They drink beers whose labels have been obscured by paper napkins failing the fight to keep the condensation which occurs as the previously frozen beers meet the tropical air, off of hands which alternate between sips and fists pumps, depending on the larger-than-life hits or misses, home-runs or OUTS displayed on the tiny television screen shoved into an upper left-hand corner between cans of sweet corn and spray bottles of Raid.

If you really don't know where you're going....keep going I suppose :)

I meant for this blog to be more of a travel journal – I wanted to record and share my impressions of and discoveries in this new culture I was transplanting myself into, but it has not turned out that way. Instead, looking back over the entries, they are much more about my internal process. I think this expectations and hopes vs. reality is probably pretty representative of my experience here as well. I had high hopes for getting deeply immersed in work and learning about the culture and exulting in the adventure of it all and finding those thrilling places within the Other where you suddenly hit upon something that feels familiar at the core. It has not turned out that way, so far at least, and I think my writing here is representative of that. Instead, these have been five months where I have been much more withdrawn into myself than I would like. I have found myself over and over again set up against the culture rather than finding ways to search within it, and the places where I see similarities are not the comforting, joyful discovery of connection between man, but instead disheartening recognition of the wreckage produced by my country and culture, as well as the general, universal folly of man.

I have been back from my trip home for about two weeks now and I think I have not been able to bring myself to write here because there is so little actually happening in my life right now. I am in limbo – I am standing around waiting. I am still hopeful that the project I have been offered through the Department of Education will pan out, but I have not been able to arrange a meeting to get things rolling yet. I have less hope that work will surface for me at CIPROS, the development organization which has taken me on. Nevertheless, I like the people who work at that office, and if the Department of Education project works out, it will be a good place to base myself, so I continue to go in, to show up and make small talk with the various employees, to eat lunch with them and to hope on the off chance that if I show up enough, if I establish myself as there, that perhaps something will change.

In the meantime, I am playing a lot – there have been a number of guests visiting my friends down here, and so I’ve been going to the beach, and on self-led walking tours of the Zona Colonial, and on picnics to the Botanical Gardens. I’ve been reading a lot, and swimming, and waiting. Parts of it are wonderful – sometimes I stop and wonder what my friends are doing on a Wednesday afternoon, while I read a novel on a lounge chair at the pool in 80 degree, perfectly sunny weather, and in those moments I recognize that this is exceedingly temporary, this break from real life. Other parts of it are much harder, and I am struggling with not having even something small to be accomplishing.

I do have a game plan however, and it is to try and exploit the temporary nature of all this free time I have. It is to get my gym routine started again, and to use the yoga DVDs I brought back from the States. It is to work my way through the enormous stack of books I lugged from Philadelphia to Minnesota to New York to DC to Santo Domingo. It is to try to post here, even if I find myself with nothing to say, or at least, nothing new to say. On that account, I’ve been thinking maybe photo essays might save me – you all seem to like the photos, right? If not feel free to say so, but otherwise, expect to be seeing a lot of photos and maybe not as many words for awhile. Well, I’m off to the pool with Peter Singer under my arm. See you later :).