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.