We enjoyed our time in Juan Dolio. We arrived early in the moring around 9am and we went straight to the beach. The beach isn´t as nice as other beaches on the East because it is man-made and has lots of waves and rocks yet we still enjoyed ourselves. We stayed at a hotel that is owned by an Italian but the style is completely Indian. She gave us a good rate, $10 a night, but ofcourse that meant mosquitos and no AC or internet (I slept in a portable bed while the other girls shared a queen).I forgot to mention, we stayed there on May 29th to wake up May 30th, Paola´s birthday. While there we met up with a few Esperanza interns, they kept us up celebrating Paola´s birthday with several games. Afer my failed atempt to call Anthony, I went to sleep around midnight. The girls stayed out later finishing a game of dominoes. I was waken up by Noemi at 4am, she wanted some shampoo and couldn´t find it in my bags. She woke up early and couldn´t go back to sleep because of the heat and the mosquitos. But unfortunatly she wasn´t aware of the time and kept on telling Paola and me to wake up to get ready to catch a guagua (mini van) to San Pedro. I refused to get up until I saw that the girls were showered, packed, and ready to go by five thirty. I got ready against my will and then went to take a walk with them along the coast. We stayed at the beach until eight to wait for Carlitos, the receptionist at the hotel, who was friendly and was going to join us on our trip to San Pedro. Carlitos was great help, he carried our bags and took the girls out to a grocery store while I said hi to my host family and bought cake for Paola to surprise her later. It was mother´s day here in the Dominican Republic so I also hopped on a motorcycle and bought flowers for my host mom (10 roses with other little flowers as filers, that how much I could buy with roughly thirteen dollars). After the girls came back from their long walk to th grocery we went to Angelita´s house, my host family last year, where she invited us for dinner. We were too hungry and couldn´t wait three hours so we headed off to Amable, a restaurant that sells "pasteles" basically tamales made from bannana. After we ate we took a much needed nap then went to dinner with Angelita. She made chicken smothered in red wine, moro (mixture of rice and beans) and a vegetarian gluten free eggplant casarole. After dinner we had the cake I bought to officially celebrate Paola´s birthday. In the evening we went to the boardwalk to see the Dominican way of celebrating mother´s day, dancing and drinking. At night we were given a dance demonstration by the local kids who danced to popular songs.
The next morning we headed towards La Romana, where I am today. We got here yesterday and pretty much rested until dinner time, since we were tired from Juan Dolio and San Pedro adventures. Today in the morning we took a boat to La Saona (a 2-2.5 boat ride) where we enjoyed our time on shallow water and white sand. We took a faster boat to a natural pool where we saw a couple of large starfish. You can see some of our pictures below. After our beach day we showered and went to our nail appointment at Jazmin´s house, a lady that does nails from her house. She was absolutely amazing, she was friendly, had great prices, and had a natural talent painting and decorating our nails. After our nail session we headed of to a fancy restaurant where we waited more than an hour for our food, we were all so tired and hungry that the wait didn´t do us any good. But now that I think about it, we can´t complain much about bad service when we´ve had such a good time here.
As you can read all is great here. Sorry for not being able to post more pictures of some of the stuff mentioned above but there isn´t wifi and I am too lazy to tranfer pictures from my laptop to the computer at the reception. But enjoy the ones below of us here in La Romana.
PS
If you want one of these pics ask me I have them as large files (they were taken by professional photographers).
Big hug and lots of kisses,
Maira
