Sunday, March 14

This weekend was hot. Today was our tour of the colonial zone, which went an hour over schedule, which means we (my friend, Aiden, and I) were out in the sun for about four and half hours including commute time. So, needless to say, there are parts of me that fairly red now. And I have this sweet line across the bridge of my nose. It’s very attractive. And this is all on top of the twenty mosquito bites I have to date. Exciting times. Afterwards we attempted to use an internet café where I was miserably unsuccessful at uploading my photos (I’ll have to reduce their sizes) and then played some Banana Grams! If you like Scrabble, you’ll love this game. It’s so addicting.

Anyway, yesterday was our trek-to-the-grocery store day. Sabrina and I walked the mile there and the mile back, chatting the whole time so that we barely noticed the distance or the dead pigs hanging from a line. This was all without sunscreen, of course, so we had a nice tan to jumpstart the sunburn of today. But the grocery store was interesting, not vastly different from ours but still enough so that you know you’re not in the richest country. What I found more interesting was our trip to a Colmado earlier in the week where we practiced our buying skills in Spanish. We were instructed to buy half an onion there. Half an onion! At first I couldn’t imagine why, but having little money and no electricity often means no refrigerators.

The night ended with a conversation on heredity. I asked my doña if she had any Torino (the native people of the island) in her ancestry or if they were of African descent, even if they had any Spanish in them. But the answer I got was very round-a-bout. She kept saying, no, we’re not African or Torino, we’re just Dominican. After a little bit of this, my neighbor, Topher, explained to me that those who live in the Caribbean consider African descent something to be ashamed of. They consider whiter to be better, so they try to either squeeze in as much white as they can or simply say that they’re Dominican. And that they’re never black, only Moreno. As if on que, my doña then said that her grandmother was white and that someone else was white, too. But they didn’t ever say if they had native Torino blood. Their ancestors apparently, just appeared out of thin air.