Long Weekend...

What a crazy and long weekend I had! Thursday I took off classes and went with a group to a very small town way up in the mountains called Montacito. It was about and hour and a half drive in the back of a pickup truck. It was one of the most beautiful drives but also one of the scariest of my life, we´re talking way off the beaten path here. When we got to the top I immediately realized that I had lost my wallet! NO!!!! About five minutes later I realized that I had lost my phone as well! That should give you an idea of how bumpy and rough the way up was. I was pretty upset, we sent a dude on a motorcycle to look but he didn´t find anything. We told everybody to look and looked ourselves on the way down, but to no avail. Montacito was gorgeous! Once I was able to forget and stop worrying about my lost stuff I was really able to enjoy Montacito. The group I went with was doing an out-clinic type thing (similar to what we did with our group that first week waaaayyy long time ago) and I was able to help translating for one of the Doctors. It was fun to be able to use my Spanish for something useful, and it was funny because while I was translating one of the translators was sitting doing nothing, but I asked him for help if there was something that I didn´t understand. About lunch time I asked a couple people from the group if they wanted to go for a walk, so we went. It was a really neat little community, hard to imagine living up there though! We found guava, passionfruit and oranges to take back and eat. The oranges were one of the strangest things I have ever eaten, they were extremely sour first and then extremely bitter after the sour. It was like eating a lime then it turned into something more bitter than grapefruit. Really quite a fuel for the senses! Olvis one of the translators told us you don´t eat those and he went out and found us some really good oranges. Natives, they are always right! We went down the mountain, and I stayed with the group until they got ice cream that night. Something very cool and unexpected happened on the way to dropping me off at my house here. The group put together some of their own money to give to me before they left since they knew I lost my wallet. Of course it wasn´t the actual money but the act that really gripped me. It was maybe one of the first times I have experienced charity like that in such an unexpected way.
After a long day thursday I got up at 530 on friday morning to head to Santiago. I ended up sitting next to my baseball coach guy who i hadn´t seen for several weeks, so that was interesting. I definitely noticed that Santiago and the drive to Santiago was a lot more lush then San Juan and the south side of the island. I got into Santiago at about 12:30, took a taxi to his school and met up with him. I only knew Drew through Tammy Leinbach so it was a little bit awkward staying with someone I didn´t know much about. But it all worked out. I did know that Drew was a teacher so I was formulating idea in my mind that his work and his school must be similar to where I am teaching. Let me tell you I was dead wrong and so were my assumptions. I started talking to the secretary and she immediately spoke to me in English. Turns out the whole school is taught by North Americans and everyone in the school has to know English because that is the language that the teachers teach in. I soon realized they inside of this school and even in Drew´s life and the life of the teachers at that school that they had constructed pretty much their own U.S.A world in Santiago. I had to make sure i realized that this wasn´t wrong just very different from where I had come from, I was used to being the only American engolfed in Dominicans. So it was an experience for me. Friday night we went to an Aguilas baseball game, which is the pro team in Santiago. Unfortunately, most of the good players that come down to play from the MLB weren´t there yet. But it was still fun, and it was funny to notice some differences between a game there and in the states, like selling grapes and apples and fried cheese is a little different than in the states.
Saturday morning we left to go to a place called 27 charcos (in English 27 waterfalls) which is pretty much the best kept secret of the DR. Its about halfway between Porta Plata and Santiago. There were no signs or anything just a road that we got dropped off on from the bus and had to walk half a mile or so to get there. We payed about 500 pesos each (15 bucks-ish) and hiked up to the 27th waterfall, from there we jumped, slid, and hiked down the waterfalls. Explaining it doesn´t really do it justice, there are some picttures on facebook for those of you who want to look there. We had a waterproof camera that we were able to use. It was incredible and I will never ever forget that experience! The pictures don´t really do it justice either but it shows a little bit of how cool it was, Drew is gonna post a video of me jumping off a waterfall about 30-40 feet or so, its pretty sweet! well thats it for now! thanks for all your prayers! Only a month left! Crazy! And I know its gonna fly too! I´ll see you guys soon! don´t forget about me! ;)

En Cristo,
Dan