Big events from the weekend

1. I stayed in Santo Domingo (yay! first time in a month I stayed put)

2. I bought new tires for my diva of a jeepeta (yay! and ouch!) and found out that the list of work that needs to be done to make my diva safe to drive is ever-growing. ugh.

3. Friends Nicki and Patrick turned 26 and 28 respectively. congrats, guys! (a moment to fondly remember the stupid things I did at those ages...., which I might have repeated this weekend in their honor). I made them a Canadian flag ice cream cake. yum!

4. I had brunch! (how little you realize this is actually a big event)

5. I got certified as an open water diver - passed the final exam with a 94%


and, perhaps coolest of all, my little Broski, JT, climbed Mt. Fuji!!!  - ok, so that has absolutely nothing to do with me, but I am completely jealous that he has such a cool accomplishment crossed off his bucket list, and at only 26 years old! what an overachiever.  I'll have to go climb a mountain now to catch up...and will definitely hope that he includes me in any plans to climb the next one.  J, what do you say we do Mt. Kilimanjaro together? - maybe in 2013? or you could come here and do Pico Duarte with me.  That's the highest peak in the Caribbean (probably not so great as Fuji....)


JT has some video of his adventures, if you'd care to watch...by now maybe you've guessed that this kinda stuff runs in the family.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C01IdCPvD2M

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26sjoxza-HQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4qSy47NDWY



 

 

that's my brother!

Last off, Leah and friends arrive in a little over a week. yay! my first guests to the island!

My country 'tis of thee...

sweet land of bigotry?  of thee I ...cringe?

Those of you who know me well and have read this blog might have realized how little I discuss work, or at least, the vagueness of my references to it. I do that to maintain the separation of my professional duties and representation and my personal opinion.  Today I'm going to blur the lines just a bit, because, man, I have got to vent.

First of all, WHAT ON EARTH IS GOING ON UP THERE?!!  I leave the country and you (collectively, and probably not the people who read this) go apesh*t conservative and close-minded on me.  Seriously. WTF? When I left, there was Arizona, tea partiers and Sarah Palin (and Fox News, but I won't go there). Now, there's this 14th Amendment BS AND the Park51 madness.  I'm ashamed of you (again, the collective, and here I'm going directly for anyone who has the nerve to protect their own religious freedom and no one elses.). 

 I did not join choose to go on my current career path 8 years ago because as much as I loved my country, I did not want to be associated its government.  Now that I am, I'm finding it a bit harder to represent its people.  That makes me incredibly sad. And it makes my job a bit more challenging, thank you very much. Among many other things,  I am supposed to be helping hundreds of thousands of people who have been denied citizenship and respect for their basic human rights due to the color of their skin (their religion and their culture)...and what argument can I possibly make to influence the government or the people of this country from where I stand as an American?  How do I promote tolerance, liberty, respect for diversity and human rights when the country I represent has fallen so far from its own ideals?  I sound like a hypocrite. I hate hypocrites.  So, I guess I'm asking y'all to do me a favor...can you please, for the love of all that is decent in this world, get your heads out of your arses and start acting like the country that we claim to be?  Thank you. 

Peter Beinart's Daily Beast Blog (a great read, and partly responsible for getting me riled up and on my soap box this morning): 
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-08-17/ground-zero-mosque-controversy-america-has-disgraced-itself/

La Romana - Bayahibe

This past weekend was a 3-day holiday weekend for us here in the DR, since today (8/16) the country celebrated their Restoration Day ( something like a "We want to be independent from Spain now day).   My friends and I took this opportunity to spend a(nother) weekend at the beach, getting our scuba course finished up. Nicki, Robert and I spent the greater part of the weekend on or under water in the south east part of the country - La Romana-Bayahibe.  Since it was a holiday weekend (and Alejandro Sanz was playing a concert nearby), we had a heck of a time finding a hotel, and ended up staying at some little budget place on a road to the pueblo's playa....in what seemed like the middle of a sugar cane field.  The hotel was clean, though, and fairly quite, and at $26/night...well, you can't really complain.

We did 3 dives off the coast of Bayahibe, which is full of coral reefs and recreated shipwrecks.  Each dive of ours was for approximately 40mins at a depth of 40ft (average over the 3 dives). The visibility this weekend was AMAZING (see the photo - which is taken from the internet, but exactly what my weekend looked like).  I'm obsessed with the color of the water here. It goes from looking bright turquoise from the surface to being the most stunning cerulean when you are below.  There were bits of sea plants floating around, with tiny, nearly invisible jellyfish appearing out of nowhere (these ones don't sting). It reminded of a scene from Avatar - so beautiful!  I found huge conch shells (left them) and the biggest sand dollar I have ever seen (took it, since it was already dead).  Now that all we need to do is the final exam, I am ready to  move on to the next step - getting enough experience for night diving, shipwrecks and maybe caverns as well.

One nice this about this island is that in our circles, most people tend to know each other.  Our scuba guy, Mark, sent us to a guy he taught years ago, who now has a dive shop in Bayahibe. Turns out the guy, John, was at La Isabela with me last month, and knows the IU people whom I wrote about. In fact, some of the cannons and the anchor that we dove around this weekend were discovered then placed there by the IU crew.  John was kind enough to offer to give us discounts any time we come back to Bayahibe. I'm sure we'll be taking him up on that offer.

La Romana-Bayahibe was such a different vibe from Samana in so many ways. For one, It is much more of an obvious vacation spot. When we were on the dive boats, I could hear the activities director from the resort calling out things to do on the loudspeaker (flashback to Dirty Dancing, anyone?)  The little town of Bayahibe feeds off of the tour buses that shuttle the foreigners from their resort to the dive center and the marina-front restaurants (owned by foreigners) and souvenir shacks. Another difference - there isn't all that much public beach. The all-inclusive hotels and other exclusive resort/living compounds that have taken over the coast do not let the non-paying public onto their beaches - even though technically, the beaches are all public land and cannot be owned. The hotels pay security guards to patrol the perimeter and keep people out.  It can be rather frustrating to see the color barrier that exists between the nice, clean white-sand beaches with their foreign tourists, and the small, garbage-strewn public beaches, full of Dominicans. Every time a little kid's ball crossed the line from public to "private", we saw the guards spring into action.  We end up being torn between the principle of the matter, and wanting a reasonably clean and nice place to hang out. Today we split the difference - scuba diving with the tourists, then hanging out on the public beach.

It was a nice weekend, full of good food and good people. And, lucky me, now I get a short work week!

A post on Community

...where Liz shows her vulnerability (this won't last very long)

Those of you who have known me for a long time have pretty much always known me to be the wanderer...the independent spirit...the whatever else you want to add.  As a little kid, I was apparently the reason that my parents had to put locks on the doors and a fence around the backyard - because at the blink of an eye they'd have to ask, "Where's Bethie?"  (there she goes, crawling through the hedges into the neighbor's yard...)  When everyone else talked about going off to college at high school graduation, I talked about moving to Argentina for a year.  I spent as much of my college years abroad as I did at Lehigh...enough for my roommates, in their so very PC way, to call me a FOB (I choose to embrace that moniker, ladies, thank you :)... So I guess it came as no surprise to anyone, least of all myself, that I chose to live a life of an expatriot (side bar - why do they call them expatriots anyway? because in my experience, those of us who live abroad and see our country from the inside and the outside, end up being even more patriotic - in the true sense of the word - than those who stay within the borders)

What did come as a surprise to me, after my 6 or so weeks here, settling into my new life, is how hard it has actually been for me.  I've had a few pensive, up-and-down moments (this is me talking, so keep it in perspective), and I've been trying to figure out what is so different this time around.  Adjusting as far as life here goes, has been a piece of cake. It's not the work and it's not the DR.  I've realized that it's what I've left behind. All the other times that I took off for one of my adventures, I left like I wasn't leaving anything behind. I mean, sure, I was leaving family and friends, but...well, I knew they would always be there for me to come back to (and they still are, and I love them dearly for that).  The independent and self-sufficient me is fine with that.  I realized, though, that whenever I left before, I always left feeling like I was the odd-ball/outsider anyway...like "we" all knew I was going to go off and do "my thing"...and that wherever I was going, perhaps I would find "my kind" there.  I found "my kind" a bit more in Peace Corps, and a lot more in grad school...then came DC.

In DC I found a community again.  To be more exact, I found several communities to be a part of.  There was my yoga studio and my meditation group, my soccer teams, my old friends, SIPA friends, and new friends as well. They all blended together and overlapped to form a comfortable support system, that I never realized how much I needed...until I left it all behind.  In DC I knew who to go to for what - who to talk to about a problem, who to go have crazy fun with, who to be contemplative with, who gave the best hugs (which I am in serious want of right now)...I know these people still exist, and that network is still there for me...but it's not the same from thousands of miles away.  So, as I slowly go about creating a new community for myself here....I guess I just want to say I love you and I miss you, my DC community.  Take care of yourselves...and keep in touch


---end of sappy, vulnerable post :-)   ---

I'm on a boat...

Ok, so I didn't quite get to live out some music video this weekend...but things have a way of working out for the best.  The plan was, (through a friend of a friend of a friend) to go spend the day at Casa de Campo (playground of the uber rich and famous, like Jay Z), hanging out on some guy's yacht.  But a message Friday night that started with "Dude, boat dude is being sketchy..." changed the plans just a bit.  Plan B - head out in that direction anyway, call through the list of other contacts who have boats, and hitch a ride to another island for the day. 

Mission accomplished.  By the time we got to the port at La Romana, we found a guy who would take us to la Isla Catalina. He met us at the docks 15 minutes after we called, and became our water taxi for the day. (Ok, the boat was more like a dinghy with an outboard motor...but it was fun and cheap.)  Catalina island is gorgeous! Soft white sand, no houses (no fresh water, actually), beautiful cerulean waters and not that many people.  There's also great diving there (but we saved that for another time). 

Today, my scuba group had its first open water ocean dive.  It was so awesome!!  I can't wait to do it again!  We went out to about a depth of 9.5m (approx. 30ft), and swum around in the corral reef for 40minutes.  I saw tons of colorful fish, including a lion fish and a barracuda. We'll be doing the rest of our certification dives next weekend, and then we graduate.  yay! 

After our dive, we had lunch at a place called the Boat House, next to the dive center on the beach. The place has the best BBQ in the DR (so they say, and we think they may be right). It's run by this guy who is originally from Atlanta, GA. So we had authentic southern BBQ (ribs and chicken), corn on the cob, and cold presidentes - yum! Go hungry, leave happy...

So, yet another nice weekend down here. I'm racking up the DR experiences left and right, but I'm ready to start slowing down now (just a little...). One of these weekends I should consider sleep as my primary activity...it's just hard to stay inside, when there is so much going on around you - and in such beautiful weather too!

The yoga changes, but the Namaste stays the same...

From the moment I got to the top floor of Colegio Bebecue (think BBQ) this evening, I could feel my heart lift.  People were starting to arrive, taking off their flip flops at the door, and getting ready to unroll their mats. As the regulars shared hugs and hellos with each other, a tall, lanky tanned man came over to greet me - a kiss and a hug and a warm "welcome to class."

I settled down onto my mat and took it all in.  This was exactly what I needed, and precisely what I had been so desperately missing in the past 5 weeks.  Eyes closed and in a supine twist, the last thing I noticed before I started to zone out was that the open air room surrounded by trees, in combination with soft background music of birds chirping, made me feel like I was in some tropical tree house. And then I let it all go, closed my eyes, and followed directions given in a soft-spoken Spanish. 

The yoga itself was, shall we say, a bit unorthodox - at least compared to my previous experiences - but that didn't matter. I won't be going for the sake of perfecting my handstand.  I was content enough to be in a yoga community again, blissing out in meditative movement for 90 minutes. And for less than $10, I've paid for a month unlimited (it's only 2x/wk...but who cares)...

So, gracias Sr. Victor, for reminding me to respirar - lento y profundo - and NAMASTE.

Las Terrenas, Samaná Peninsula

How in a world of 6 billion+ people this little corner can be a peaceful and secluded paradise is beyond me...but I'm hoping its the necessity of 4WD and a car snorkel that helps keep it that way.

My weekend trip to Las Terrenas marked my first weekend overnight in the DR - the first of, well, however many weekends I have left in this country...since I now fully intend to escape every possible weekend.  A handful of friends and I left right after work on Friday, and made it to the beach by the afternoon.  We found a nice little hotel with apartment villas, and it cost us maybe $40/person/night.  We stocked our little fridges with presidentes and cuba libres and settled back to celebrate our friend Robert's birthday in paradise. (I have a feeling that I might find a new paradise each week, so be forewarned of my further over-use and abuse of that word...)

Saturday we went to a beach called Cosón. It's only 5km farther down "the road" from where we were in Las Terrenas, but without an SUV, you would be SOL.  I got to christen my newly acquired set of wheels (a well-used and worn in 1998 Mercedes Benz ML320 - jeepeta) by testing their off-road capabilities.  Not too shabby for either of us (me driving, my car surviving...).  We got to Cosón after maybe 20 minutes of serious bumps, but it was well worth it.  The only thing at playa cosón, besides white sand and turquoise waters, is a fish shack that counts on its menu a short assortment of items - fish, conch, shrimp, or lobster - take your pick and they make it fresh.  We spent the day playing bocce with coconuts and drinking ice-cold presidentes. 

Saturday night we ventured out to another beach, slightly closer than Cosón, but on far worse roads...(i.e. totally submerged)..at the end of the road to Playa Bonita is a little hotel called Atlantis, run by some 'French Hippies".  They have a fabulous al fresco restaurant, where they make everything themselves - including the ice cream!  We only stayed there long enough the celebrate a birthday dinner, but I think we all made private promises (to ourselves) to return soon and often.  At night you could see all the stars in the sky, and hear the waves lapping just a few meters away. 

Seeing the glorious natural resources and potential of this island can leave one slightly conflicted...like our support for the tourism clusters.  I applaud their effort to help develop the communities outside of the all inclusive hotels that form their own colonies along the coast. I certainly champion their efforts to protect the environment and further conservation in the country...but if their success means that our little sleepy haven of Las Terrenas becomes overrun with spring breakers - well, selfishly I'd have to say no thank you.  Go back to the all inclusive and leave the rest of us to the hidden jewels. The economic divide in these communities, though, is huge.  Something like 8% of the (small) population of Las Terrenas is French.  They drive around the little streets in ATVs and own gorgeous beach front villas.  On the flooded road to Playa Cosón, however, half-naked little boys run around in bare feet, peeing just off the side of the road. Their families fit maybe 6 people into a small shack, made of clap board and tin roofs (rusted!).  It's no wonder who would lose big if a hurricane hits...and I have to wonder which group the government would be more interested in - the tourists and their $$ or the fishermen and their shacks.