Checking Out Santo Domingo

This was it: our last full day in the Dominican Republic. We decided that the history and touristy sites of the capital city Santo Domingo sounded too cool to pass up. Plus I think we'd all had enough time in the water by this point in our trip.

We pulled the same trick as yesterday, telling our tour guide to pick us up in front of a nearby well known resort. Our bus was unfortunately much more normal than this one.

Our guide had us stop to take a peek of the Chavón River. Our guide listed off several movies that included scenes that were shot here including Apocalypse Now, Rambo: First Blood Part II, and Jurassic Park.

The local shoe shop.

One of our gripes about the tour was the crazy amount of time they made us spend in gift shops. Like hours.

Taking pictures of souvenirs is so much better than buying them.

Our first stop was at this baseball training camp. I've read a bit about these places and they sound a lot like baseball sweat shops, with young kids quitting school to try to strike gold in the MLB. Here's an article about it.

We got a little tour of Los Tres Ojos (The Three Eyes) at the Parque Mirador Del Este.

The "eyes" are underground lakes.

We passed this street with lots of big water tanks, power washer looking generator things, and dudes sitting around on plastic chairs in the shade waiting for customers. I finally figured out that these were car washes.

The Columbus Lighthouse (Faro a Colón) in the distance there is bright enough to be seen from Puerto Rico.

The National Palace

Even Santo Domingo has a Chinatown. There are a lot of Chinese people to go around.

Cristopher Columbus' brother Bartholomew founded Santo Domingo in 1496, and according to Wikipedia it's "the oldest continuously inhabited European settlement in the Americas, and was the first seat of the Spanish colonial rule in the New World."

We went on a guided tour of Alcázar de Colón, which was the residence of Columbus' son, Diego. Christopher was promised all sorts of things for finding the New World, including money, titles, and power over the lands he found. Not long after his discoveries he lost favor with the Spanish Crown and so lost many of his privileges. His son Diego's life seems to have largely consisted of trying to reclaim said lost goodies that he felt were rightfully his with amounts of success. Diego was named Viceroy of the Indies in 1511.

Fun fact: there are no known contemporary portraits of Christopher Columbus which means this painting, and any other you've ever seen of him, are completely made up.

The Panteon Nacional, where many of the country's heroes are buried. This whole tour of Santo Domingo was supposed to be in English, which was half true. It was in both English and Spanish. Our guide changed languages literally every other sentence. It was hard to listen to because he had to talk so fast that sometimes he would be half way though a sentence before I even realized it was English.

Parque Colon in the Colonial Zone of Santo Domingo

Our last stop was the Cathedral of Santa María la Menor, which is the oldest cathedral in the Americas, begun in 1512 and completed in 1540.

The next day we packed up our bags and said goodbye to our condo.

Festive Supermarkets, Chicken Butts, and a Hacksaw

We started off our day with a trip to a market. A few of our group members talked at length about it being a really scary place. So scary in fact they convinced me to leave my camera on the bus because it would be instantly stolen by ruffians. I feel like having seen the place that that was an exaggeration. I was a little grumpy about it after all the cool stuff I saw. It was sort of like half market half jungle. There were all sorts of backpacks, clothes, and other wares hanging from the ceiling so low that I had to duck. The vendors were all yelling out at us, probably trying to drum up our sweet, sweet foreign business. A couple of them were even a little grabby trying to pull people into their stalls to shop. It was funny how random the goods offered were. One guy was selling buckets and birdcages. Our mission was to buy chicken butts(yeah, weird) and vegetables for a stew for the women at a cancer hospital. When we got to the area where the meat vendors were, things really got serious. There was the smell of a giant cauldron of soup being stirred nearby. Meat was hanging from hooks all over. There was a cow’s bloody skull on the ground that stray dogs were sniffing around. One stall owner had a long strip of rubber that could have been left over from an engine belt. He used it to whip any of the dogs that got too close to his delicious meats. This exchange always ended with a loud “YIPE!” and the dog scampering away. We got our ingredients pretty uneventfully and got the heck out of there. I heard a lady that was on the trip last week bought two machetes to take home. That sounded pretty awesome so I have been on the lookout.

We went to the cancer hospital, again laden with toiletries and other gifts. The majority of our time was spent sitting in a circle with the women and listening to their stories. Many of them had to take bus trips lasting days to reach the hospital. The timetable for their treatment was also painfully slow. Some had been waiting months just for test results. It was pretty sad. We sang songs with them and gave them little gifts. The whole thing felt kind of pathetic because what we gave them was so small compared to their troubles.

The chicken butt stew.

We returned to the same La Union supermarket but this time it was much more exciting. August 1-10 is the feast of Santo Domingo, so there was a live band inside and all of the staff was wearing flannel and cowboy hats. It was very festive.

The store's employees would insist on pushing our groceries to the bus for us.

The second half of the day was much less mentally taxing. We went back to the school to do some pretty medieval construction chores: things like shoveling dirt full of rocks and cutting rebar to length with a hacksaw.

We tied smaller wire around the rebar by hand to keep it in place.

Lydia and I agreed that the school could use a native English teacher.

Chocolate covered coco beans are like a multi-layered Inception of chocolate.

Looks like Fanta is trying to horn in on little Rojita's business of terrible tasting bright red soda. This version also tasted like weird medicine.