Paying high prices for food, that no one but tourists can afford, is not our idea of travel. Our idea at Scotttreks is to find healthy, well prepared food,served in good surroundings, where locals eat, for local prices.
This neighborhood cafe is a six minute walk from the La Puerta Roja Guest House.
At the intersection of Calle Santome and Jose Gabriel Garcia, this neighborhood eatery has no flashing lights, not even a sign on the outside of the building to identify it. I didn’t know it was alive until I looked inside open doors and saw people eating, spotted the sign above the cash register, saw that Google maps said I had arrived by flashing me an arrow.
Next trip back I’ll try some of the potato dishes, cole slaw, beef, plantain, and other Dominican Republic specialties. This trip I’m sticking with rice, chicken and okra cooked like my Dad liked it.
To my south is George Washington Avenue that runs south of the Zona Colonia and is one of the toughest streets to cross in the world because there are no stop lights and I don’t trust people to stop for me in the walkways.
The Caribbean water sparkles in this afternoon sun and the palm trees remind me of Los Angeles, Padre Island and Belize.
I have my favorite places.
Most of them are warm, by an ocean, and in the Caribbean.
Games of choice on the neighborhood streets seem to be dominoes and chess but I have also seen checkers and card games with money on the table.
This street corner game, in progress,even has an official scorekeeper who shouts out the score at the end of each game and visits his cell phone often. Some of us pedestrians stop to watch. This is likely an ongoing game between friends who have money and/or bragging rights involved.
The men don’t talk much. They slap their dominoes on the board when they make a play. When they shuffle the dominoes to start each new game in the series, it sounds like feet hitting the floor in a salsa dance.
It is quitting time, with darkness starting to move in, and the most conspicuous thing missing is rum.
When this tournament is over, the players and onlookers will go into the nearby colmado and take care of drinking business.
It doesn’t cost much to sit on this corner. When one tournament is over, different players take seats at the table and start another. There is luck involved as well as skill. You can have good dominoes but it you don’t play them right they aren’t worth a damn
No one says anything about my picture taking, and, I wouldn’t expect them too.
These guys wives, and girlfriends, know where they are.
There is always a plaza in these old historical centers, full of people and things to see and do.
People who run the country work inside offices that surround the plaza, eat in restaurants on the corner, attend civic functions in the square, make business and romantic deals on these same benches we tourists use to take a breather.
This plaza is jumping today with a sound stage, live music, speeches, booths with information on stopping domestic violence and helping police help the public more effectively. There is a news crew moving about and men with big cameras are getting big pictures for the evening news. The female news anchor is properly curvy and young and we will like watching the news tonight even if we don’t like what is being said.
Pigeons in the square look for handouts and aren’t disappointed. They remind me of Sebastian Park in Cuenca and the street pigeons in San Juan Del Sur, Nicaragua.
When the kids run at them, the birds take flight, but soon, they drop back to the ground and fight for whatever has been offered to them.
The plaza has been here since the 1500’s, when the first Cathedral in the New World was finished and Christianity was brought to pagans who were subdued by swords and better technology.
I imagine kids were chasing pigeons, even in the 1500’s, and these benches were still occupied by tourists come to listen to Sunday Mass from the courtyard as Cathedral hymns flowed out the heavy iron doors like melodic waves.
Homelessness is no stranger in urban environments.
Disparity, economic and otherwise, is visible in older rougher parts of cities, worldwide,where no one with money wants to live. Urban flight has created downtown areas where people, who have nothing. sleep on sidewalks and warm themselves, on cold nights, over fires burning in empty fifty five gallon oil drums.
We have homeless in Albuquerque who construct cardboard houses by the freeways. They push their shopping carts down sidewalks and congregate at bus stops. They stand at major street intersections with hand scribbled signs full of bad spellings asking for money. As most of us, who have volunteered to help, or have been homeless, know, this homeless army is Veterans, college graduates, parents, brothers and sisters, friends, people who have run out of luck,people that no one is looking for. Most have dropped out, many are drug addicted or mentally ill. They are lost, covered with anonymity in the midst of plenty.
Even wealthy societies haven’t come up with solutions.
This soul,in the passageway on my way to Colonial Square, is tossing food to pigeons. They come waddling closer as she throws a handful of popcorn out. They are not timid, not afraid.
There is something Biblical about this scene.
When I see someone with nothing, give what they have,Jesus becomes more than just a possibility.
When I remark that I have a cold, Yuri asks if I want some ” Mama Juana? ”
” I don’t want marijuana, ” I answer.
” No, ” she laughs, ” Mama Juana. It is a local drink, good for colds. ”
Berluis shows me a jug which looks like it is filled with bark off a tree, which, it turns out, is. Research says this alcoholic drink was concocted by local Taino Indians who put rum, red wine,honey, herbs, and bark in a jug to make a happy time drink.The drink is good for colds, flu, digestion, circulation, and cleaning the blood.
” It won’t hurt me? ”
Yuri shakes her head ” no” and Berluis pours us all a little into plastic cups, not unlike my golfing crew’s ” birdie juice ” cups.
We drink to the Dominican Republic, and, happily, no ill effects have been noticed.
The alcohol content is subdued and the drink is sweet, not unlike Jamaica Tea.
” You can’t say, ” Yuri explains, ” You have been to the Dominican Republic without trying Mama Juana. ”
People don’t need to have a health reason to drink but having a real cold makes this sampling real good for me.
Learning about local traditions is always a plus, especially when they taste so good.
The boy walking the sidewalk in front of me is tossing a banana into the air and catching it as he walks. It could be a baseball, a football. a soccer ball, a stone or a pencil. Boys toss things into the air, catch them, and feel good with the world as it is.
Along the way, he stops at a slightly leaking hose that has been repaired before with wire that has become rusted and no longer solves the problem. He kneels down and inspects the water problem, holds the banana alongside the hose as if it would make a splint. Boys like to fix things.
I pass and continue down the sidewalk on my way to the Colonial Zone.
A leaky hose is a problem we can solve in a world leaking problems.
For now, throwing and catching is mostly what is on this boy’s mind
Girls will change his equations, in a few years, and his chalkboard will look like Einstein had a hallucination.
Throwing and catching brings back some of my happiest times.
The last police band i saw was in Cuenca, at a celebration for ex-pats and foreign business development in that Ecuadorian city.
This Santo Domingo events aim is to support women and fight domestic violence in Latin America.This police band provides some of the entertainment. There are uniformed officers patrolling all the tourist destinations in this ” old City.”. and, except for getting hustled to buy things you don’t want or solicited to take a guided tour from one of the many guides in the area, the Zone is very safe.
The police band’s music is contagious, in a good way.
It is good for the police to show their gentle side since most of their job deals with locking up family, friends, and strangers who choose not to follow rules.
Police are still humans, we sometimes forget, who wear guns, handcuffs, badges, drive official vehicles. play in the police band, and put people in jail.
They can never lose their humanity no matter how much bad they have to clean up.
When public servants and institutions lose their humanity, we all lose.
For those who have trouble putting up a shelf on the wall, someone had to build the house you live in, the car you drive. Someone had to educate your kids, grow the food you eat. Someone in the background has to mow your lawn, do your tax forms, listen to your heart, fix the pothole in the street.
In every place Scotttreks goes, people are at work doing unglamorous,tedious, dirty jobs that keep civilization going.
Luckily, people are gifted to do different things.
A world of actors would be all talk and no substance.
In a world without financial men and women, nothing would get paid for.
On a planet without ministers, we would all get big heads and believe the world rotated around us alone..
Without dreamers, there would be nothing new around every corner.
There is always work happening wherever Scotttreks goes.
Working men, and women, are worth celebrating.
The Zona Colonia is the ” Old City ” Santo Domingo.
It was established by Bartholomew Columbus in the early 1500’s and is the oldest European settlement in the New World. It became a base of operations for Spain’s conquest of the America’s and was fortified and manned by armies of the King of Spain till Spain lost its political grip on the America’s, but left it’s religion and culture firmly intact.
Now the Zona Colonia is an official UNESCO World Heritage destination for tourists interested in roots, culture, and human history.
My Airbnb guesthouse is within walking distance of the walled, fortified, old city. It is in a working class part of Santo Domingo. The George Washington Highway and waterfront is several blocks to the south of me, the Plaza Independence is several blocks to the north of me, the officIal Zona Colonia is several blocks to the northeast. Instead of turning the pages of a history book, I just have to go out the front door and start walking through a living history book.
Being close to a destination site is a good business model. For twenty dollars a night the price is right for travelers like myself who like basics but would rather put travel dollars towards food and entertainment instead of fancy sheets and designer pillowcases.
On my morning walk through my new neighborhood,there is nothing out of place.
People are making a living, raising kids, doing business, doing soul work and the devil’s work.
The photos speak for the place.
There is plenty of life here to go around.
When life is working right, it sounds just like a properly struck tuning fork.
Visibility is restricted on airplanes.
Looking out through a small porthole, flyers can see parts of their plane, but mostly see clouds. Sometimes the clouds are white as your grandfather’s hair while other times they are puffed up like a boxer’s bruised right eye.
The terra firma of the Dominican Republic fills my porthole as we fly over the island and begin our descent. Instructions for landing are given over a sound system in Spanish and English. We are thanked for our compliance, urged to take all our belongings with us, go through Customs, enjoy our trip and fly United again.
This island is large, with plenty of water, and grows everything, and the surrounding sea has plenty of fish. This island is the size of Georgia and is one of the largest of the Caribbean islands, behind Cuba and Jamaica.
Setting down with a bump, on a wet runway, this ninth Scotttreks trek, has begun.
I’ll be stepping back into history this trip, jumping into the Unesco certified Colonial Zone in Santo Domingo where Spain established its beachhead in the New World.
Landing, my travel notebook is empty, waiting to be filled.
Some of what fills Scotttreks is by choice; but the rest is up to fate and the travel God’s.
Where my attention goes is what I write about and photograph, and what draws my attention usually doesn’t have lots of bells and whistles.
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