It was a great pleasure to meet Carolina's mother. She was not only a great help greeting us at the airport, but she made us feel safe and was a connection to home, while we were in a foreign country. I think most of us were surprised when arriving in Santos Domingo. Being the capital of the D.R. Santos Domingo we thought would be relatively free of the signs of poverty: dirty streets, stray dogs, etc. however the nicest area of town surrounded the presidential palace.
The next morning, we left early to the bus station. The hotel organized a transportation to the bus station, and after bartering (unsuccessfully) our taxi driver semi-safely delivered us in plenty of time for us to make the bus. The bus trip was nice. We traveled with mostly locals, who may have been shocked to see a group of gringos traveling to Santiago. We found that we were at a great disadvantage not having a fluent language speaker on the trip. When the bus rolled to a stop in Santiago, it took us a good 10 minutes to find out we were in the right spot.
We grabbed our bags off the buss and in poor Spanish asked the first person we saw, if this was in deed Santiago. The person answered "you must be the Carnegie Mellon students." After a brief bathroom break, we tossed our bags on the back of a flat bed, and jumped up to join them. We rode through the down town of Santiago, as somewhat of a spectacle. Happy to be close to our destination we responded to most honks of horns, and flashing lights with a smile, a wave, and a possibly incomprehensible "hello."
We turned off the main road, and arrived at our new dwellings. Unaware of where we were going we were pleasantly surprised when we stopped in front of the home of Elaina - our host Senora.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment