I am so excited to be on this trip! Seriously. I woke up Tuesday morning
in a panic because I thought I over slept and missed my flight, but I looked at
my watch and it was only 4:08am. It was difficult to get out of bed, but I made
it out on time. Saying my see-you-later’s (I don’t do goodbyes) were easier to
do than I expected (no waterworks), but I had not anticipated the trouble with
my boarding passes. So being the genius that I am, I forgot to print my
boarding passes ahead of time and the airline didn’t know to connect my two
flights. The attendant was very helpful about straitening everything out, but I
will admit I was very embarrassed when I noticed that my baggage-check took two
or three times longer than everyone else’s. Well you can’t win them all, right?
At least I didn’t have to be additionally embarrassed by having an oversized
suitcase and having to play the
“what-can-I-sacrifice-to-not-have-to-pay-100-dollars” game.
The flight to Miami was fine, very smooth. I tried to sleep,
but I couldn’t get comfortable (mostly because I couldn’t figure out how to
recline the seat: fail). The kid next to me was a high-schooler going on a
mission’s trip with his church flying for the first time…ah he wasn’t that bad.
I did, however, have to tune out his obnoxious airplane jokes. I don’t think he
realized that a plane can just take off from the spot where you board, on
account that it would crash into the building, but maybe he’ll figure it out on
his next flight. The view coming into Miami was really cool. It was funny to
count all the blue amoeba shaped swimming pools in the back yards of clusters
of subdivisions. From the sky all the houses look identical, but the pools were
all different. I guess that’s how you know you’re at the right house. “I’m
home! Oh oops wrong one, my pool has an extra blob on the left side, sorry” The
clouds were so fluffy and white, I wanted to sleep on them. They were perfectly
plush and I think if it were possible, I would definitely get my bed made out
of cloud material.
The layover was taking FOREVER!!! The longest 10 hours of my
life. I wanted to sleep, but it was hard because it was so cold! My nose was
red, and my lips had turned blue (ok, so I’m exaggerating a little). The worst
part is that it was 88 degrees outside and I felt like I was in the arctic. I
checked my toes for frost bite….thank you air conditioning. I did good fighting
off the urge to buy a lot of food, but that is hard to do when there’s nothing
else to do. I even got some tea to restore some heat to my body.
The Flight from Miami to Santo Domingo was smooth, although
there were about four screaming children on somewhere behind me on the plane. I
would have been ok if they were infants, even a year or two, but there is no
reason for four, five, and ten year olds to be screaming and shouting on a
plane. It was a late flight, so you couldn’t really see anything coming into
the city…actually I’m not really sure how the pilot found the runway it was so
dark. Well, we made it safely, so I guess he knew what he was doing. Off the
plane we all noticed something very special about the Dominican Republic…the
people here are beautiful! Their skin is flawless, beautiful hair and features,
AND they are super nice! There was a cluster of people waiting for their family
members to get off the flight, and they all greeted each other with big
passionate hugs, and smiles and laughter. It was amazing!
I got to meet some of the other ladies in the program, which
was cool. I don’t think we’re going to have any problems, but the summer is
still young. After successfully making it through customs and retrieving my
luggage, we were greeted, very enthusiastically, I might add, by Christine and
Juan. The led us to our chariot, which was a bus with curtains strait out of
the movie Aladdin, and we took a thirty minute trip around the corner to our
hotel. We thought we were going to do some bonding once we got there, but we
were so tired by the time we got in, everyone pretty much collapsed. I’ll admit
that I slept like a baby.
First Dominican Encounter: success
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