Dominican Republic, Summer 2014: La Vida Dominicana (Monday Week 2)

Last Thursday we had a cena comparativa, where all of the host families in one neighborhood cooked one dish of the meal, and our group of students went from one house to the other, meeting each others' host families and seeing their hoses. It was a really fun way to get to know each other better and try different kinds of Dominican food! We started with a salad with a delicious passionfruit dressing, then a vegatable soup. For our main dish we had pasta with bacon, and then mangos and an almond cake for dessert. Finally we had coffee, tea and juice at my family's house.

In general the food here is a lot fresher than in the US, and there are fewer grains and starches. I've only eaten bread a few times, although rice is pretty common. (Red beans, called habichuelas, and rice is probably the most typical Dominican dish--I love it!). I've tried a lot of plantain dishes too, including mangú, which is mashed green plantains, frequently with onions and/or cheese. Fruit is also a huge part of the Dominican diet, especially fruit juices. We have a mango tree in our backyard and I have mango with breakfast every morning. Sometimes all the sugar can be a little much for me (and this coming from a girl with a massive sweet tooth!) so I try to drink water whenever I can. I've also had a lot of chicken and fish cooked with really delicious spices.

The culture is also rather more relaxed than in the US. One of the first phrases our resident director Ryan, taught us was Cojelo suave, which roughly translated means "Take it easy."Most people take a long lunch break in the middle of the day--we have a three hour break between classes from noon to 3 where we go home, eat lunch and rest a little bit. You also see people, especially older men, hanging out outside and socializing at all hours of the day. However, Dominicans, especially upper-class Dominicans, tend to care about how they look a lot more than in the US. At the university, pretty much all of the students look nice, and for special occasions people really go all out. I attended my host sister's graduation from PUCMM on Saturday, and it was a beautiful ceremony, but I also really enjoyed the opportunity to people-watch. For women, heels, lipstick, and jewelry are all more common and more showy than in the US, and men's clothing is just more fashionable in general. Overall, I like taking the effort to look nice, although I've been passing on the heels, since even in flats I'm taller than most Dominicans who are wearing heels!

I also have to correct some of the info about my host family that I posted earlier. While adjusting to the language barrier and just general settling in, it took me a few days to realize that the family profiles that were sent to us introducing our host families were four or five years old, so a lot of things have changed since they were written. Anaida, my host mom, has a husband, Miguel and three children, Carlos, Carolina and Melissa. Miguel was living and working in New York, but he had a stroke a few years ago and came home. He walks with a limp and has some speech problems, but he seems like a pretty happy guy and spends his time doing work around the house. Carlos is married with a three-year-old son, Carlos Angel. He lives nearby and comes over a lot, and Anaida and Melissa frequently watch Carlos Angel. He's particularly friendly and easy to talk to, and he's taking English classes so he likes to ask me questions about grammar and punctuation. I also love playing with Carlos Angel--he was very shy the first few days I was here, but now he talks to me and likes to climb all over me. Carolina is also married and lives in Santiago, although further away than Carlos. I met her and her husband for the first time on Saturday. Melissa is the youngest. She's 23 and just graduated from PUCMM on Saturday with a degree in dentistry. She is living at home for now but wants to go study in Brazil in the fall.

We started classes on Wednesday and went to the beach on Friday (we don't have classes on Fridays). The beach was called La Ensenada, and it's about 2 hours from Santiago. The water is super blue and shallow, and there's barely any waves. We spent most of the morning in the water, and then had lunch, which was fish, salad, rice and beans, sweet potatoes (batatas) and tostones (fried circles of yellow plantains). In the afternoon, we took a 25-minute boat ride to a tiny sand little island in the middle of the ocean. The boat ride was fast, exhilarating, and very wet, and I would do it again in a heartbeat. We went snorkeling at the island (my first time). The reef and the fish were a little less colorful than I was picturing, but there were all sorts of different fish to see if you looked closely. I also saw an eel that was more than three feet long!