Five weeks is a short time to understand what life in a city is like. Ours for sure isn't a typical life in Santo Domingo, but it also it not at all the experience of a tourist. For the most part, we live like our family here - the kids go to their school and we go to ours.
Again, our goal in being here is to learn Spanish. Or at least as well as we can in five weeks. Whether it's talking with our host family, taking taxis and public transit, or taking classes, this experience of immersion is helping us immensely. It's giving us a strong base for which to build on when we arrive in Peru. It's a head start to learning there, with the hope that we will be more useful there faster than we would have been without these five weeks. To give you an idea of what a typical day is like, read on.
When we get up around 6:45, our little "sisters and brother" have just left for school. Yanelis, the Mom, sets breakfast out for us and makes coffee. Around 8 AM we call for a taxi. The first few days she would call for us, but now we call and she provides "back-up" when our Spanish fails us. Usually it works out. It seems like they know us now - the Americans who call at 8 AM and say, "¿Como?" a lot . The last time I called and said (in Spanish of course) "I need a taxi at Don Greggorio" (our neighborhood), the operator said our address before I could say it. I just laughed.
We head to school in a taxi since it's only $2 more than taking public transit, which would involve a lot of walking and take a lot longer. On our ride to school yesterday we had a conversation with the driver about how wonderful rice is. We seriously talked about the wonders of rice, i.e. rice with beans, rice with milk, rice with corn, plain white rice, etc. etc. for five minutes before moving on to other Dominican food we like.
For four hours each weekday we have Spanish class. We were told before coming here that four hours is considered "full-time" since you can't absorb much more than that. It is definitely true! Four hours is almost always completely exhausting.
At 1PM, class is over and it's lunch time! Our favorite place is a little comedor, a simple, no-nonsense lunch spot. Minimal decorations, plastic chairs and tables, and a small counter where the food is served from. We get the bandera, a typical Dominican lunch of a mountain of rice, habichuelas (the most popular type of beans here), meat in sauce, and a side salad of pasta salad or cabbage and other vegetables in a vinegar base. It's about $3.50 per person, huge, and delicious! $3.50 per person for a meal here is not at all typical; we've been surprised to find the food to be very similarly priced to food in the U.S.
To be continued from 2 PM on...
No comments:
Post a Comment