So, it's been at least two weeks since I last posted, but since those weeks (and especially weekends) were more than busy I don't feel too bad about being a little late.
I guess it would help to give a little more info about my classes and the university itself. PUCMM is considered the most top-notch school in the D.R., and is even called by some "the Harvard of the Caribbean" (which will sounds both suspect and familiar to my fellow Ole Miss-ers). The school itself takes up a pretty large chunk in the western part of the city, though only a small portion of that is taken up by buildings: the rest is sort of like a larger, more tropical version of the Grove, which I for one am more than happy with.
My classes are about as Crofty as possible: Dominican studies, Spanish (I squeaked by into the advanced level), Caribbean culture and society, Dominican-Haitian relations, and Hispanic-American Literature. The first two are only with other American students from my program, and the next two have a good mix of Americans, Dominican and Haitians, but the literature class is with 25 Dominican students, all of them guys on the road to be priests because it's part of the theology department (!). This is the only class that worried/worries me a little because it proceeds at a pretty rapid pace, meets only once a week (but for three solid hours at a time), and I'm having some problems figuring out my assignments. Hopefully though, everything will work out well as I get into the swing of things, and it's bound to be one of my more rewarding classes. Oh, and I almost forgot about sculpture! Me and Stephen, one of my American friends, along with about 7-8 Dominican girls meet once a week for this class, which really should be called wood-carving since that's the material we're going to be working with exclusively (So far I'm pretty terrible at it, but we'll see).
So, school's taken up most of my time during the week, except for a brief sojourn to a karaoke bar near the University for a friend's birthday and a Jazz Night last monday at a schwanky rooftop club elsewhere in Santiango. The weekends, though, have been even more eventful. Friday before last we went to see la pelota, or a baseball game, in Santiago's stadium. The game was pretty empty because no one expected the Aguilas to win, but win they did! At this point they're playing in the Dominican version of the world series and will move on to the Caribbean World Series (which includes Puerto Rico, Colombia, and others) if they win that. Saturday morning a couple of friends and I caught an early bus to Sosua, a town on the northern coast, to check out the beach. The beach was pretty crowded, but we ate an excellent, if unhealthy, lunch (fried chicken and tostones, fried plaintain chips) and the water was clear and very blue. The only qualm I had with Sosua was that when I swam around with my goggles I found not only fish but a good bit of trash floating around the bottom. This is something to be expected in a touristy place, I guess, but it's the only aspect of life in the D.R. that has attracted my attention negatively. At first I just kept wondering "Why do people just throw out so much trash?" After a little bit of more objective thinking I've come to the conclusion that the trash that's so common on roadsides and even downtown is more a testament to the failure of effective sanitation services and government in general than to Dominicans' penchant for littering. In fact, I'd imagine we'd probably have even more trash at home than here if we didn't have so many inmates doing the picking up. Anyway, trash wasn't a problem at all at la playa Ensenada, the beach we went to as a group on Sunday. Words really can't describe (and pictures don't do justice) to how amazingly beautiful this place was. We spent the morning on the actual beach and after a huge and delicious lunch (I ate a whole parrotfish), several of us took a long boat ride that took us past many more beaches and a mangrove swamp to a tiny sandbar way out in the ocean, surrounded by coral reefs where we went snorkeling all afternoon and where I was buried up to my head in sand by my obliging fellow snorkelers.
This past weekend's activities were somewhat more sober: we traveled to a community in the mountains between Santiago and Puerto Plata and helped to build latrines (read: outhouses) for the people there. We were there from Friday to Sunday and I'm happy to say that the only bad thing about the trip was the cold at night when we tried to sleep. We got a lot done though, and I was glad to be able to do something other than just enjoy myself 24/7 (how selfless of me, I know). This week is well on its way now, and more than full of homework, so I'm already looking forward to this weekend, when I'll be going on a 4-day hike to the top of Pico Duarte, the highest peak in the Caribbean, with some of our Dominican friends' church group. Until then, ¡Adios!
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