...Porque No!!!

More days of nothing followed our trip to the beach, which at this point just seemed like a dream. They finally decided to take us into one of the nearby cities to do some interviews for our projects and to do a little sightseeing and shopping. I thought I was used to riding on the back of a pickup truck until we had to ride 30 minutes on one, the longest trip by far. My whole body was sore from balancing and tightening all the muscles in my body, and even ones I didn’t know existed before, to keep myself within the truck and not on the side of the road(mom, I’m being safe, I promise). Our first stop in the city was to a private health clinic where I got to interview an OB-GYN for my research, which turned out to be an extremely helpful source. We spent most of the morning waiting on others to do their interviews, but the waiting room was entertaining. There were a lot of staring eyes at the herd of Americanas sitting there with notebooks and pens, looking health as can be.

At one point it was just three of us sitting there, the other two clearly American, and me, the possible Dominican, maybe Cuban, one of the bunch. This one guy comes up and starts talking to the other two, and doesn’t even notice me as I was playing Tetris on my cell phone. I even laughed at how awkward of an encounter it was, and he didn’t realize that I too was American. The receptionist is laughing at this man’s attempts to speak English and hold a conversation, and we exchange a few glances trying not to explode in laughter at how comical it was. This guy was such a creeper, he wanted to know their names, where they were from, if they had boyfriends, it they wanted to marry him… it was so weird, but very funny at the expense of others. The guy found out one was from Michigan, and said when he lived in Boston, he had to take his aunt to the Michigan Hospital for some kind of operation, and that was weird, because most people in this country think that New York is the United States and that Boston is a city in New York, which is close to Chicago (aka they don’t know anything about the geographical make up of the US). So it was weird that he knew where Michigan was since most people have no idea and it’s as safe to say I’m from Michigan as it is to say I’m from North America. One girl interviewed him for his project and he was turned off when he didn’t get paid for participating and finally went away.

After that we were led part way through this new city by one of our professors, but then he ditched us and left us to our own devices to navigate through this new town that we had never been to before (good thing we’re adults and I speak Spanish pretty well). I had a mission to get some linen to make a pair of pants with my host abuela, and the others had missions to just do some shopping. We successfully killed two birds with a couple of stones, but in a reasonable amount of time. We found this one store that was incredible, the clothes were so cute and the floor was sparkly it was so clean. I felt like I had walked into a boutique in Manhattan. Just to give you all some background, stores in the DR have a specialty (like clothes, books, food, etc) and then they dabble in everything else. For example, in the photo store where you buy cameras and frames and get pictures developed, they also sold Pink by Victoria Secret bra and panty sets. That is the norm. So to find a store that sells clothes and shoes, and only clothes and shoes, and that were not second hand, or imported from the states, was incredible! But so were the prices, so most of us didn’t buy anything. We did run into another group of girls there, and we all decided to leave and get some lunch.

After finding a kind lady to give us directions towards the central park, we made our way to a nice pizzeria owned by a little old Italian man from Florence. He was so nice to us, and his food was amazing! I got a ham and cheese pizza, and it was the best pizza I had had in such a long time. As if providing us with good food wasn’t enough, his restaurant had wifi! Unfortunately I didn’t have my phone with me, otherwise I would’ve called my mommy, but that was beside the point. This little strange who moved to the DR because he had arthritis and needed the heat to keep the swelling in his fingers down was an angel sent to us when our spirits were at their lowest. We were all just talking about how we were ready to go home or at least back to Jarabacoa, because we were not cut out to live in the country, and he just gave us city girls some comfy creatures in the form of pizza and internet. Feeling rebooted, we were ready to take on the campo for a little while longer, knowing that we were almost done with our journey.