Welcome to Puerto Plata

Puerto Plata is on the north side of the country, not too terribly far from Jimani as the crow flies. However, a mountain range sits in the way, and so the day after the aftershock earthquake, we spent 11 hours in the car on our way back to Puerto Plata. The trip back to Santiago we had seen on the way to Jimani, just going the other direction. Most of the drive from Santiago to Puerto Plata was made in darkness, so we were unable to see the beauty of the countryside. We arrived at the Makarios house, where we will be staying for the next month, around 8:30 pm, and after meeting a few of our fellow workers, we settled in to our room.

Our room has three bunkbeds, two of which we have pushed together to form our bed. The other is currently serving as a place to set stuff, since we don’t have a table or anything yet. There are two windows in our room. From one window you can see the ocean, and from the other you can see Mount Isabella (if you crane your neck a little).

Our first day here we relaxed a bit and then went to La Sirena for lunch and shopping. La Sirena is like a small Super Walmart, with everything from groceries to clothing to motor oil and household objects. It also has a food court where you can get a massive amount of pasta for about $5, or the traditional Dominican fare of rice, beans and some sort of meat.

We put “kitty” money into the pot every week, so the house has money to buy the usual items, like bread, sandwich fixings, breakfast things, and the like. On the subject of breakfast, eggs here are bought in flats of 36, and they are just left out until you need to use them. Milk comes in boxes that can stay in the cupboard until they are needed. However, as we all grew up with cold milk, our boxes of milk often reside in the refrigerator. Bread is refrigerated so it doesn’t get moldy.

After our trip to the grocery store, where we bought a mirror and some other generic things, we came back to the house via the malecon, the “boardwalk” that runs along the ocean. Andy and I decided to walk back down to it, and found it takes about 25 minutes to walk from our house to the ocean. Sunday is “Dominican beach day” and there were lots of families on the beach.

A group of young boys was playing baseball, and Andy remarked how they were all doing exactly what was proper for the infield fly or whatever play was going on. In the US we teach football from an early age, here they have baseball.

It is a nice, sandy beach, with lots of kids playing. Puerto Plata was a big tourist destination twenty years ago. Times change, and the nearby beaches at Sosua and Cabarete are now the beaches to see and be seen at. There are many hotels near the beach that are no longer running, courtesy of the shift in tourism and a big hurricane that hit a few years ago. A few of the smaller ships may still come in to port here, but most go to the other towns. It’s a whole lot easier for us to just walk to the beach. Perhaps next weekend we’ll make it to the “good” beach on the guagua. But that’s another adventure for another day.