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.
There are, according to the web, 1.2 billion Catholics in the world today.
This number, of course, changes every second because people are born and die every second and because counting anything is never easy.
This Cathedral, in the middle of the Zona Colonia, is striking and was the first church in the New World, built in the early 1500’s. It is a huge structure with thick fortress walls, high arching ceilings and carefully laid stones.There are stained glass windows high in the interior of the Cathedral and the worship area features a huge open sitting area used for mass plus six chapels on each side of the common hall. At one time, the remains of Christopher Columbus were interred here.
The Catholic church itself is one of Christianities monuments and, at one time, was a glue that held much of the world together. Religion tends to transcend country and the binding power of the church is well known to many of my friends who got their hands struck by a ruler when they didn’t learn their ABC’s in Catholic School, talked out of turn, or told a bad joke.
The Cathedral inside is so big, so tall, so heavy, so forceful, it makes me catch my breath.
This is a must see for anyone visiting the Zona Colonia. In this Cathedral, history speaks, without speaking,and, in silence, makes its strongest statements.
Pat reminds me to dig deeper into amber, when I’m in the Dominican Republic, highly valued by Kings and royalty way way back when we had Kings and royalty.
Tunneling deeper, I walk myself to the Museum of Ambar at 454 Calle Arzobismo Merino Street in the Zona Colonia, four blocks from the Plaza Colon.
Brunilda, standing inside the Museo’s front door, opens it as I reach for the door handle,and warmly welcomes me inside with a cheerful ” Good afternoon.” She leads me upstairs on a guided tour of the amber exhibit that gives me a history of the amber industry in the Dominican Republic.
For those who need a refresher on amber –
Amber is tree sap that has stuck around millions of years.
Jurassic Park popularized amber with its premise of bringing dinosaurs back to life by extracting blood from insects preserved in amber who had bit dinosaurs, then using dinosaur DNA inside the insect blood to create real dinosaurs.
Amber sometimes has bark, roots, leaves, vegetables, ants, termites, lizards caught inside it.
Amber comes in lots of colors, shapes and sizes.
“Blue Amber ” is found only in the Dominican Republic and if you hold ” Blue Amber ” up to light you see the blue tints.
Amber,dropped into a saline solution, floats. If the amber you have doesn’t float, it isn’t worth the price you paid for it.
After our tour, Brunilda escorts me to the museum retail store.
Even though I’m sold on amber, i don’t buy anything today.
Not taking money when I go on little expeditions is one of my best travel precautions
I want to see a movie about a tourist caught in amber who comes back to shopping life in the twenty third century.
The first thing he wouldn’t be able to buy would be a battery for his cell phone.
Having worked construction for years, customers have always appreciated a clean work place.
Construction sites go through a lot of stages and there are times when clean is the last thing on a builders mind. There are times it is best to leave a room dirty rather than clean it now and then re-clean it in several hours.
Still, the men who left this temporary sidewalk, on a downtown street, should get some kind of ribbon to pin on their T shirts.
Who says construction people can’t be tidy?
This, from where I am walking, is a sight to see.
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