...and the good times continued.

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This is a little frog that made a really cool noise who lives in the caves.

After the caves we went and watched the windsurfers on Cabarete, said by some to be the windsurfing capital of the world.
I ate a sweet mango and some Haitian women came up and haggled me into getting my hair braided.

We stayed the night on Cabarete at this awesome hotel right on the beach. The guy at the counter said that you can hear the music from the bar at night but we still couldn't understand why it was so cheap.

The view was awesome, the location perfect, the room was clean...and then the music started. It was the most raucous party I have ever heard! We, fortunately, were able fall asleep anyways thanks to some training on the loud streets of Harlem.

The next day we had virgin pina coladas for breakfast from the bar downstairs and then took off on a gua gua tour of the north coast. We were on 5 different beaches in one day. We stayed in a hotel on Malecon with another ocean view.

The next morning we left on our way to the waterfalls. This was the thing I was looking forward to the most. We took a few Gua Guas out into the country and I hired a few guides, Amilka and Gabby to take me up the falls. They grew up around the falls and they think of them like their own backyard. They were amazing guides!!

We started hiking up a river and then we got to the first waterfall.

We climbed up 8 waterfalls using ladders and ropes and sometimes just climbing up the rocks.
When we got to number 8 I needed I decided to start heading back so they showed me how to get back. To get down #8 you jump 25 - 30 feet into the pool at the base of the falls. This is me ready to jump.
The rest of the seven were a series of natural waterslides and jumping off the rocks. It was beautiful and SO much fun.

After getting back from the falls we jumped in another series of gua guas and headed to the airport. We missed our flight by a few minutes so we hung out in the airport for a while enjoying the warmth and then headed back to New York. It was murder getting myself on that plane and getting myself off of it into the cold NYC weather was even worse, but I made it back, for better or for worse.

A series of good decisions

Blogging is hard. But I am doing it anyways just because I promised mom and dad.

So I had a week off and after a year and a half of my students pestering me, I decided to head down to the Caribbean to a lovely little Island shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic. About 97% of my students are from the DR and so I am already fairly familiar with the food, the culture and their variation on Spanish. I headed down Tuesday morning with my friend Amy and some clothes shoved into my backpack.

Leaving the freezing cold of New York was the first good decision. Going to a tropical island that is sunny and 80 degrees in February was another.


Good Decision #3 - Tubagua Plantation
We arrived and were picked up at the airport by the owner of our first “hostel”, Tim. He drove way up into the mountains outside of Puerto Plata to a beautiful, green compound of thatched roofs. There was running water and toilets and comfy mattresses with a common area under a large thatched roof.

Where we slept...
The common area...

The view from the sinks where we brushed our teeth..
The kitchen where we spend most of our time hanging out with the locals...

It was gorgeous and we spent most of our time in the kitchen chatting it up with Tim and his wife and his kitchen staff. They were real Dominicans, completely untainted by the tourism machine of the coastal cities. His neighbor fed me fresh avocados and yucca from his property. Tim gave us great advice on where to go, made a call to a friend to secure our next night stay, and then drove us down the mountain. He stopped at a local school so I could take a peek inside and chat with some of the students.

Good Decision #4 Gaining insight into my student’s views on Education upon arrival to the U.S.
The students were packed into small dark rooms with no lights.

There was very little structure and they were allowed to get up and wander around as much as they wanted. They were walking in and out of class and there was very little instruction going on. They go to school there for 3 hours a day. I walked into one of the classes for 14 year olds and there was no teacher. I asked where their teacher was and they told me she had been in a meeting for the past hour. The kids were left on their own. I saw a teacher in the 1st grade class break up a fight using a metal stick to hit both kids’ arms.


As I walked around I just kept thinking…NO WONDER!!! No wonder they can’t sit down for an entire class period, they have never been asked to do that. No wonder they are illiterate and are not used to focusing in class, they had sparse instruction throughout their entire education. No wonder they get up and wander around in the middle of instruction. It was a HUGE eye opener.

Good Decision #5 Spending a whole day doing nothing but loving the sun.
We caught a “Gua Gua” (a mini van into which they jam as many as 28 people into that serves as kind of a public bus) to a beach a few miles east called Sosua. We ordered some lunch and ate on a plastic table in the sand looking out onto a beautiful beach. I had fish and Mangu (mashed plantains with onions).
As we sat there for the next 3 hours people kept coming up and offering tasty treats like mandarin oranges, peanut brittle, and coconut vanilla bars. Then we moved to some chaise lounges and fell asleep listening to the waves and went swimming in the beautiful clear water when it got hot, and that is when it happened; I fell in love with the DR!

We went to Cabarete on a gua gua that night and wandered around this party city.

Good Decision #6 Searching for the fountain of youth
Outside of Cabarete there were some caves and after following a long tour of the flora of the DR
led by a college student who seemed bound and determined to make us understand the corruption in the Dominican government, we were lead down a long, dark slippery staircase into a darkness.

At the bottom of the cave there was a pool of fresh water, said to make you ten years younger. I jumped in and it felt great, although kind of creepy to swim in a pool of water at the bottom of a cave where you can see NOTHING!!!
More to come...