Arrival to the Dominican Republic.
Portland, Oregon…quite a comparison to Santo Domingo. OK, lets start from the beginning. We left the airport at 11:20 pm. It was an easy flight from Portland to New York. New York was an interesting experience. The first thing I felt as soon as we got off the plane was the humidity. Ugh! It was awful…of course it was raining…which just made things worse. JFK was ok…there were a couple of birds that almost smacked right into me [because they were flying inside]. The funniest thing happened after we were on the plane and ready to leave. We got delayed about an hour or two for RAIN! Being a true oregonian this is just really amusing to me = ] A couple of hours later [ 4 to be exact] the island of the Dominican Republic appeared from behind the clouds. It was a beautiful sight. Arriving at the airport we went through all the normal customs stuff. It was interesting being an actual “foreigner” in a different country. I have never had to go through any type of immigration before. Also just the fact that everything was in spanish seemed a little weird to me. I dont know why, but it took a little bit for it to hit me that spanish was all they spoke here. As we walked out of the airport, we were treated like the most important people in the world. From the airport door to the sidewalk where we wanted to grab a taxi, there were tons of people lining the sides like papparazis in a movie premiere. Being the selfish person I am [wink, wink] I loved it…The taxi drive. WOW. Life is different. It seems to be that there are no traffic rules in this country. Sarah certainly describes it very well in her blog above. Our taxi driver drove in the middle of two lanes for who knows how long. While all on a nearly empty tank of gas.Our hotel is very nice. Here it is a middle class hotel, not to extravegant but not a dump. Compared to U.S hotels this is a four star hotel. As soon as I got we got off the taxi we were approached by two bell boys who took our luggage. They opened doors, held elevators an did not let us do anything by ourselves. The whole staff is very friendly. I could really get used to this…Our first evening here was quite an experience. Once settled into the room we decided to take a stroll along the beach. We walked around on the sidewalk [because sadly the beachfront on the santo domingo side is very polluted] and did a little sightseeing. It started to rain a little so we decided to go back. Liz, Tomas, Gabriel, and Christian had not arrived yet so we decided to blog and take pictures while waiting.
Once they arrived we decided to go out and have some dinner. The cab driver took us to a lovely restaurant everything was awesome. The food, great. After dinner being the tourists we are [and the crazy americans] we decided to walk back to the hotel. It was sprinkling a little but we didnt think much of it…cmon nothing like oregon…it probably just made us feel more at home than anything. Well, minutes later it starts raining, like actual drops of rain. We decided to keep walking since we figured we were already wet and it was warm outside anyway. Little did we know that in the Dominican tropical weather is very weird. The rain continued and it started pouring. Pouring buckets of rain…we were soacked so we ran to take cover. Now this time we decided to let the rain slow down a little. On our way back we had the most interesting looks from people. It was impossible to tell that we werent tourists. Finally we ended our day happy, wet and exhaused. With lots of great memories packed into one day.
~clara
