Safe, Sound, and Sweaty: Week 1

Jess and I arrived in Las Terrenas three days ago and are settling into our new house. Our friends Josh and Rebecca and their awesome kids drove us here from where they live about two hours away. We took the bus to their house from Santo Domingo and stayed overnight with them. They started a community library in their city (San Franciso de Marcoris), so we went and checked it out (ha! "checked it out, get it?), and discovered they have a maravilloso collection of books. Josh and I took a walk through town to visit their competition, the "public" library of San Francisco (where you can't actually check books out and take them home, and where all the books are at least thirty years old). We fell asleep to the "soothing" sounds of the music from the bar across the street blaring until 2 am, and then drove to Terrenas the next day. Had a plato del dia Dominican-style lunch with Annette and Jose (the people who run the school) and their two kids then went to the beach and swam in the insanely clear, blue water. We ate dinner at a restaurant on the beach—best pizza I’ve had in years, dead serious. Not cheap…but delicious nonetheless. In fact, things here are not quite as cheap as one would have hoped. We should be able to make it work considering that our main source of entertainment (the fantastical beaches) are free!

We seriously live here...

Our house is called Casa Paz. Las hormigas and las cucarachas are our roomates, but I think we’ll be able to scare them away…hopefully? All the windows have screens (which is lucky because they don’t have glass!) so the mosquito situation isn’t bad in the house at all, thank god (have you heard of chikungunya? Look it up…). Jess is happy because the roof is made of tin, so when it rains it sounds soothing.

We live right in the middle of town, so walking everywhere is not a problem (a walk to the beach takes a mere cinco minutos!). Annette and Jose live in a lovely house across the street. They have a starfruit tree in their yard! (I thought starfruit were created in labs, that's how delicious they are.) Our neighbors are very sweet Haitians with adorable kids who all live in a tiny, run-down house and who hang out on the street most of the day playing some pretty damn good Haitian tunes pretty damn loud on their stereo. We can buy plantains at a colmado (small store) on our side street (also toilet paper!), or we can get anything we need at any of the seemingly hundreds of stores in town. There is a French bakery about a block away with some wickedly good pastry. Who would’ve thought? It’s all a very strange mix of super poor people and European expatriots riding four-wheel ATVs and Dominican tourists and foreign tourists and stray dogs and stray cats and moto-taxis and dudes hanging out in the street playing dominoes all day and fruit stores and picture-postcard beaches and lottery shacks and palm trees and blaring music (did I mention the blaring music?) and ants and mosquitoes and nice hotels and tons and tons of small restaurants and churches and pretty much everything under the sun. I think we’re going to like it here…if I don’t get eaten by a giant cockroach.

I know we look tasty, Cucarachas, but please let us live!

Now, if I can only learn Spanish quick enough so I can talk to people! I want to talk to the people! Jess is lucky, and I’m jealous that she can talk to all the people. I just stand there looking mute and stupid. Good motivation to work hard, I guess.