This little restaurant is one street north of the D’Beatrice Comida Criolla, another local eating place near my Santo Domingo guesthouse just outside the Zona Colonia.
At lunch yesterday, there was a line here backing almost out the front door and all the tables inside were occupied.This morning, its doors are open and it is early enough to get a good table by a window. It is quiet and a cool breeze rushes through the room, coming from the Caribbean Sea a few blocks to our south.
Regulars are just finishing their coffee, joking, getting ready to go to work, all men in their forties and fifties going to jobs to support their families.
The beauty of the Zona Colonia is that you find new twists every day. As a traveler, everything begins new, and, by the time it stops being new, it is time to board a plane and fly home. When you get home, the travel spirit is still burning inside you and you see your own home with new eyes and a new heart.
Keeping our spirit alive takes a little work..
Having bacon and eggs, I meditate on spirits and hope all of mine get along today.
Keeping your body healthy for your spirits is not an unhealthy thing to do.
Plaza Espana is a popular night spot in Santo Domingo.
There are events and live music here. but, this evening, early, people are just beginning to arrive as the moon rises just above Columbus’s right shoulder.
The Alcazar de Don Colon is closed and there is only a light on in the front entry where a night watchman fixes himself a cup of hot tea before he walks the Palace and talks with ghosts.
Tables in front of the restaurants will be filled before long and waiters wearing red pirate bandana’s will be shuffling out drinks till the wee hours of the morning.
In the old days, this Plaza must have been filled with shrubs, tropical plants and trees with secluded alcoves where men and women exchanged carefully worded letters sealed with wax and lipstick.
Today, through the night, cell phones light the romance way, fingers moving like those of a nervous groom just before his wedding.
The Plaza Espana, this evening, is just beginning to heat up.
Tobacco farms and factories are actually located closer to the city of Santiago but you can get a whiff of the industry in Santo Domingo.
The Arturo Fuentes Cigar Club, in Santo Domingo, is a retail smoke shop, but it is also a gathering place for those who love to smoke their cigars and talk about the experience. It is a home, later in the evening, for anyone who wants to shop for fine cigars and accessories, have a drink, book one of the private smoking rooms for a personal party, or just sit in the bar and share cigar stories with people who love to hear them.
Alan, my cigar loving brother, tells me he met Carlito Fuentes at a cigar exposition in Las Vegas, Nevada a few years back and has a photo of Carlito and himself with Carlito’s sister. Alan likes the “858” Maduro’s and appreciates the civic works of the Fuentes family.
This morning the store has just opened. The cleaning staff is at work dusting and vacuuming and the receptionist is kind enough to show me the club’s premier cigar vault, answer my questions, wait for me to call my brother to see what cigars he wants and show me some of the Club’s perks.
One of the coolest areas in this shop is a little room, off the main lobby, that has individual lockers stocked with their owners own personal stash of cigars. One of the lockers is owned by Angel Jimeniz, a professional golfer. His name is written on a nice little card in a slot on the door of one of the lockers.
The sales girl finds me a nice box for the half dozen cigars I buy, rings up my sale, and packs Alan’s cigars nicely. She, calls me a cab, and advises me that the cab ride is ” not more than two hundred pesos ” which turns out to be 100% correct.
Next time back here, I’ll dress nicer,spend more money. and leave her a bigger tip.
People on this island are exceedingly gracious.
If they had this store, in the Zona Colonia, I would be there every evening, cradling a cigar, still in its wrapper, in my right hand, listening to patrons rambling about their cigars, their love life, politics and their latest business victories.
I can think of better addictions to acquire and cultivate than smoking, but I would never talk bad about someone pursuing vices that only hurt themselves.
The little cigar making room, entered through a small corner tobacco shop in the Zona Colonia, has four men inside. One is reading the paper, another is watching the cigars being made, two men are working – making cigars, by hand, one at a time.
” He is muy rapidio, ” I remark.
” He can do 300 in a day if we don’t talk to him, ” one of the non-workers says.
By the look on both men’s faces, who are working, they must be paid by the cigar. They are intent on what they are doing, responsible for making cigars so people that smoke them won’t smoke any flaws.
This workplace smells like tobacco.Tobacco leaves, dry and thin, are clumped around a press on the floor. There are pieces of leaves on the desk of the man in the gold colored shirt, and more on the work table of the man in the blue shirt.. It appears the two workers make a team. One man makes the rough cigars, stores them in a wood sleeve that the other man pulls to his table and finishes. The tools both men use are simple and not any different from what either might have used a hundred years ago to do the same job.
I watch the finish man pick several cigars up from his finished stack to check the smoking end to make sure, once lit, the cigar will draw air and keep its combustion.
These men take pride in their work.
If I was a cigar smoker, I would like to smoke the ones they are making this day I am watching them.
Men will turn themselves into machines if it profits them, but men, bottom line, were never made to be machines.
Just off Colon Plaza, straight east past the Pizzerella pizza parlor, Juan Voight shows up to work every day.
He says he has been an artist since he was a little boy, teaches at the college just behind his little outdoor work space, and makes his living as a full time artist. He works deliberate. Watercolors demand precision, a good sense not to let the brush stay too long in one place, be too wet or have too much color in the bristles. Watercolors can be quirky, like water itself.
Juan’s items for sale include originals, but, also popular, are postcards he runs off in series of 100 and sells three for $10.00 U.S. His prints are of scenes one sees in the Zona Colonia – the Cathedral, the Plaza Espana, the Parque Colon, the Alcazar de Don Colon.
Juan remembers me from an earlier conversation and takes the time to make me a special carrying pocket for my postcards, carefully recording his name and instagram gallery url on the outside.
I remember the studios of Carlos Paez Vilaro, the Uruguay artist ,and Roberto Ibarra, in Montevideo, and Ann’s studio in Granada, Nicaragua, and my mother’s studio in the downstairs of our home in Albuquerque, paintings in all stages of completion hanging on walls till they were shipped to competitions or hung in galleries.
I remember the Cerulean Gallery in Amarillo, Texas.
I remember street art everywhere.
Juan’s works are a combination of creative spirit tempered by the hands of a craftsman..
The medium you work in makes demands and determines your process and product.
Scotttreks postcards average two hundred words each.
You can’t say too much in two hundred words,but you never want to say too little.
Every time I pass, I see customers at this little empanada stand – ordering, sitting in these plastic lawn chairs,visiting, stopping a moment in life, standing, moving away, replaced in moments by someone else.
It is all very random. The process is like those parts of the atom scrawled on our high school Biology board – the protons, electrons, neutrons and all the things not up there that we still don’t know about, and may never know about.
The empanada menu here is extensive and all are less than one U.S. dollar apiece. This morning, for breakfast, my order is a ham and cheese empanada, a pollo empanada and two orders of pineapple juice naturale, served with ice in a dixie cup.
I should have tried these empanadas earlier in the trip but stuff always crowds you on trips, distractions and diversions, side trips and just plain not getting around to it. The point is, there are always places to get a quick bite within walking distance of where you are staying, if you look.
I appreciate fine dining with exquisite tastes and beautifully designed plates served on white tablecloths with a candle and the best silverware, but I always regret having to pay for a meal and then having to go buy more food to feel full.
If I lived here, I would be a regular and D would give me the local price, like anyone else.
At night, when it is cool, Santo Domingo neighborhood people, in the Colonial District, congregate in front of the local mini market and watch sports on a big screen television.
This group of grown men and women, on the closest corner to the the LaPuerta Roja Guesthouse, are watching an American basketball game on television this midweek evening. Some men are on their cell phones, others are talking about something other than the game in progress, the rest of the congregation are watching equally grown men in under- shorts running up and down a hardwood court, tossing a ball into a basket, and getting paid millions.
Anything that gets people out of their house and visiting their neighbors can’t be all bad.
Sports and competition run deep within all cultures.
We all like to be entertained and mildly challenged but when things get too serious or too hard, many take their ball and go home to bed..
Spectator sports have long been one of the world’s biggest enjoyments.
Sitting out at night under the stars watching a big screen television on a working night, and not spending a dime, is beginning to make a lot of sense.
Words, bless their little hearts, can say a lot of things. They can take the form of a contract, come firing out of mouths like an old gattling gun . They can make people love or hate us, and, in the right mixture, sooth and calm the most indignant customers.
This afternoon, words escape me, as a young woman carries a basket of baked goods for sale atop her head, past me on the sidewalk.
By the time i turn to get a photo she is past me, only a fleeting mortal being moving across a busy Zona Colonia intersection.
At this moment, the only words that some to mind are ” Poetry in Motion. ”
In my mind, she will always be frozen in time, beyond words.
According to one of my first guides, Alberto, this Godfather Street is where parts of the movie ” Godfather ” were filmed.
Alberto, who is missing one leg, but transports quickly, even with crutches,took me on a tour the other day to the Plaza Espana, which is close, and the Alcazar de Don Colon.
This Godfather street, like the famous Lombard Street in San Francisco, is already famous. We watch enough movies that movie streets become even more recognizable than the streets in our town.
This street is a tough walk, uphill, but not as tough as some. The little multicolored house fronts look traditionally Caribbean and a wine bottle stuck in one of the pedestrian rails looks like a good solution to sticking the bottle in your back pocket, or purse, or pitching in onto the street below.
The Godfather street this Monday afternoon is not busy. People at the bottom and top stand on corners to visit and a horse and carriage whisk past me as I snap a few mementos for Scotttreks.
This is a place the Godfather would have hung out, drinking and smoking a fine cigar while deciding the direction his crime organization was going to go.
Even in crime, you have to always be concerned with competition.
Dirty laundry catches up with all of us.
Only bringing a carry on suitcase this trip, and looking at my pile of dirty clothes on the bed, I am down to my last clean socks and shirt. I could have brought a bigger suitcase but I wanted to travel as light as I could. Doing with less always takes more imagination than taking the kitchen sink.
In my neighborhood, this lavenderia takes my dirty clothes in the morning, gives me a receipt, hands my clothes back clean, folded neatly in a plastic bag, after lunch. The charges are six bucks, which seems high, but, then again, someone has to deal with my clothes by hand. Putting them into the washer and dryer, unloading them, folding them nicely, putting them in a plastic bag, writing up the receipt, taking my money, takes human time and human effort.
It turns out, when I get back to the La Puerta Roja guesthouse, where I’m hanging my hat this trip, they have a washer and dryer I could have used for free, just paying for the detergent I use.
Since dirty laundry is a traveler’s constant companion, I resolve, next time to be patient, to ask before taking my dirty duds off the premises.
After all, dirty clothes don’t care how long they sit in a pile on the floor or whether they ever get clean.
Dealing with dirty clothes is one of life’s dirty little chores our mother’s warned us all about.
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