Stepping Out of the Boat

With only three free weekends left in our stay here, we decided we needed to check some things off our to-do list. Marte, a teacher at school who has been really friendly with us, has a membership to a club where we've gone a few times. He invited us again a few weeks ago, but it didn't work out. We wanted to make sure we went with him one more time before June 22nd. After school on Friday, we went with him to enjoy the pool, have a snack, and John even got to play a few games of basketball. He took his basketball shoes home when we went to Robby's wedding, so he had to play in flip flops, but he was still the best one out there. I cheered for him. The other players wished they had someone to cheer for them, I'm sure.

We stayed until about seven, then went home, showered, and went to a dance club called Club 60. It was GREAT!! We didn't take the camera, but John and I danced the night away. We have gotten so good a Meringue and Salsa that we can really hold our own out on the dance floor with people who have been doing this for years. John even danced with the other girls, and they couldn't stop talking about how good he was. We'll probably go back there again before we leave because it was air conditioned and it wasn't at all sleazy. It was a dance club for dancing - not for all the other things that happen at dance clubs (I'd like to remain blissfully unaware).

Today, all the other foreign teachers went to the beach for a day. We decided that we wanted to do our own thing, and that going to the beach the way they were going would be much more of a pain than we wanted. We're going to the beach for the whole weekend in a couple weeks, anyway. So - we decided to go see El Faro a Colon instead.

We started with lunch at our favorite nearby Chinese place where we can get two meals out of one. Jade has been one of the places we've gone frequently, so we thought it worthy of a picture. Then, we called a cab and headed across the whole city to El Faro a Colon, which is a gigantic memorial made to Christopher Columbus. His real name was Cristobal Colon, but for some reason, all the American text books call him Christopher Columbus.

This monument is apparently one of the only man made structures that can be seen from outer space. You see, it's a ten-story building made in the shape of a cross, and there are extremely high powered lights all along the roof. When the lights are on, the cross can be seen shining in outer space. They very rarely turn the lights on, though, because it causes power outages all throughout the city whenever they turn them on. Inside the enormous cross-shaped building rest (reportedly) the bones of Cristobal Colon. Spain and Italy both claim they have the remains, as well, but no one knows for sure. We paid 100 pesos (about $3) to get in and see the museum inside the cross-shaped monument.

The entrance is at the top of the cross, and in the center, where the four "arms" meet, there is a large marble monument that houses the remains. It is guarded all the time by an armed guard dressed in white. The bones are in the black box close to the ground in the middle of the monument. I'm standing by it in the picture to the right.

In the long hallway that makes the longest part of the cross, there are rooms containing artifacts from the native peoples of countries all over the world. We weren't supposed to take pictures in these rooms, but we did anyway. There were no lights on in the whole thing, so some of the exhibits were hard to see. We found it ironic that the memorial to Cristobal Colon would contain artifacts from native peoples from around the world since one of the things he did first on the island of Hispanola was to completely eliminate the native people who lived here. He eliminated them by working them to death and letting their language and culture fall into obscurity. No one knows what the Taino culture was like. He also brought Catholicism. I'm sad that the cross was a symbol of destruction and death to those people.

The museum would be really cool if they would turn the lights on in the exhibits. I'm not referring to the superpower lights on top - I just wanted to see the stuff inside the museum. If there wasn't a window in the room (and most rooms didn't have windows), we couldn't really see anything. It was interesting nonetheless. We can check it off our list.


After we had finished there, we called another cab and headed to the old Colonial section of the city where we walked around (about 5 miles of walking) to make sure we had seen and taken pictures of everything we want to before we go. Here to the left is on of the first hospitals in the new world. It was built in 1503 and was one of the only buildings in Santo Domingo that survived the raid by the pirate Drake in the 1600s. Now it is inhabited mostly by pigeons, and the roof is no longer there.


We looked at several other old churches (besides the first cathedral in the New World) and some other old buildings. The first monastery was destroyed by Drake the pirate, and rebuilt several times after numerous fires and hurricanes. Then, it became an asylum for the insane. It was all locked up, so we couldn't go inside, but our Lonely Planet Guide to the Dominican Republic said that you can still see the iron chains in the walls that were used to restrain the "patients" in the asylum. YIKES!

After a long day of walking (it was cloudy today, otherwise we might not have survived), we were sweaty and tired, so we got some pop and sat down on a bench in the square by the first church to watch people. We saw an extremely conspicuous group of about 40 Americans all in matching T-shirts milling around by the statue of Cristobal Colon. They were acting really annoying in the way Americans act annoying abroad, and John and I were a little embarrassed for them. For a moment, we wished we didn't look so much like Americans.

It has been a great weekend so far. Tomorrow, we might try to go to the national aquarium so we can cross that off our list, too.