TRIP DIARY
Saturday day 1:
-A little hung-over from last night, boy did I have a blast! I’m trying to make sure I have everything packed but there are so many little bullshit things I m missing out on. We leave for the airport at 2 am tonight to catch an early flight to Calgary. I m so stressed about this whole flying thing.
- Checking in at the airport was ok it was totally deserted but I managed to run into 3 ppl I know don’t I feel popular :P Vanessa practically got strip searched at security which was pretty funny.
-Ok here’s a list of things you don’t want to see and hear on your first airplane trip. 1. randomly blinking lights in the cabin
2. a confused sounding Capitan who is uncertain about what altitude we are flying at and who has to check some papers to correct himself not once but twice.
3. A flight attendant that forgets to do the safety stuff till we are well on our way.
Ahhh air Canada how little confidence I have in you, yet I survived in one piece (clearly cuz im typing this) and I only wanted to puke once. Now I have to prep for my 7 hour flight to punta cana stressssssssssssss!
Sunday Day 2: Calgary airport sucks compared to Edmonton’s it is so closed in and architecturally unpleasant plus there is this horrific mural of brightly coloured plastic cowboys….this is supposed to be art?? Haven’t slept in a 24 hours getting tired.
- Im sitting on my own on the plane this one is bigger than the one we took from Edmonton. I m surviving but every time we hit turbulence my tummy flip flops….must focus on the in flight movie…..oh wait my speakers don’t work. grrrrrrrrrr air Canada sucks lol.
- We made it safe and sound to the resort. The airport was cool toddy got his carry on searched until the guy asked if he was Canadian he said yes and then the guard stopped and told him to have a great trip not being American rocks (his carry on was filled with mini bottles of booze too so he totally would have been busted)! Its so warm here I can hardly believe it. The 45 min ride form the hotel was ok it was dark out but you could still see a lot of the poverty and decay in the places we drove past I m sure this trip is going to be a real eye opener. We had our first drinks in the lobby it really is a cool looking resort, I m soo tired tho I couldn’t sleep at all on the plane so that’s almost 3 days no sleep uggggg. The rooms are really nice and roomy and sooo clean I was expecting bugs everywhere but there isn’t any. We are like 100 feet from the ocean and you can practically spit in it from our balcony its so pretty here at night.
Monday Day 3
- we have an amazing view of the ocean from our room, the food is ok we spent most of the day on the beach I played it safe and stayed pretty well covered with my 60 block on everyone else is horribly burnt, suckers! Pretty much no one here speaks English btw so we are feeling a little out of our element. Note to self next time learn the language b4 u go to a country. We had an awesome meal at a Mexican restaurant soo tasty with non stop tequila I am in heaven.
Tuesday day 4
- hung out at the pool bar today. Americans can be so obnoxious grrrrr but we did meet some really nice ones too. We planed our trips today were doing the 4x4 8 hour tour of the country and I am doing the swimming with sharks and snorkelling tour. Everyone is in serious pain from there burns I m still pasty tho. Vanessa’s snoring is keeping me up at night I almost wanted to strangle her lol.
Wednesday day 5
-We went shopping to a local market today the salesmen were insanely aggressively friendly but I had a blast negotiating them down to a reasonable price. I got the best deal I think out of everyone I got a whole bunch of stuff down from 145 to 34 dollars with some free crap thrown in. I don’t think I want to go back to paying full price for things lol.
Thursday Day 6
- We went on the 8 hour 4x4 jeep trip today. It was pretty cool usually its 4 ppl to a jeep but my aunt and I got our own (I drove all day woooo). We went to there largest sugar plantation first. It was gigantic we drove through it for like an hour that’s how big it was. Sugar cane was tasty but the village that we stopped at in the middle of the fields was a little intense. Most Dominicans refuse to work the sugar cane cuz it pays so little so they import ppl from Haiti to work it. The people there were really really aggressive and they all had machetes. Thank god our tour had a security detail with us. This one guy pretty much was threatening me for a dollar while our jeeps were stopped with his machete. I kept my cool but my aunt was freaking out. It probably didn’t help that I don’t know any Spanish. I would have given him the dollar had we not been stationary cuz then they would swarm the car (which the did anyway) this one kid climbed on the back of the jeep ahead of us while it was moving …..very very intense.
- We went off roading for a bit (tho all the roads are in such horrible condition that just driving could be considered off roading). Went to another plantation saw how coffee chocolate and a bunch of fruit is made, also saw a simulated cockfight which was pretty intense got some great action shots with my camera tho.
- More off roading took us to this untouched beach in the jungle I went for a bit of a hike on my own and found a stretch of beach all to myself and swam through he reefs for a bit it was so surreal and beautiful.
- The drive home was insane it was during rush hour and it’s a bout a 2 hour drive I think the driving was my fav part tho, you really get to see how the Dominicans live, the roads are so random and no one obey road laws of any kind and everyone is trying to get in front of you no matter how fast you are going. The roads are so sketchy sometimes more than half of them are washed away or impassable. It was such an adventure of the 3 traffic lights we saw one was blinking in a rapid pattern one never changed colour and the third no one obeyed anyway it was NUTS! I loved it but it really makes u appreciate how orderly things are in Alberta. DR is such a beautiful country but its so shockingly sad to see all the really poor people who seem to get by on so little. I realize now how lucky we are to have all the things we do have here. Also there is so much trash everywhere no one seems to care about where they throw there garbage so sad and icky in places..
- The tour was a bit disappointing our guide (who we were told would speak English) basically ignored the English speaking families and spoke French and Spanish exclusively that and it wasn’t organised very well oh well hope tomorrow is better.
Friday Day 7:
-So we were waiting in the lobby for our bus to pick us up for the shark reef tour.
- Since no one speaks English u just get used to not really communicating with the ppl running the tours. This ratty bus pulls up and a driver comes up and looks at our tour receipt and motions for us to get on. Me Dad Vanessa and Todd all hop in after he appears to check our names off of a list on his board. We get in and go to another resort and pick up a Russian couple who also spoke no English. As were driving through a sketchy neighbourhood the driver picks up this random guy off a corner. After this we continue driving and the driver turns around and starts demanding money from us. We look at the pamphlet he handed us and this tour was clearly not the one we had paid for. So he continues to demand money from us and we’re all kinda freaking cuz we are miles away from a resort in a rough area. So we demand that he take us back and him and the guy he picked up start talking to each other very quickly. Meanwhile im trying to talk to the Russian ppl in Ukrainian to give them a heads up that these guys were running some sort of scam. First time I ever got to use my Ukrainian I muttled through nicely but I m not sure they got the message. So we demand for them to take us back, the 2 guys in the front start quickly talking to each other in Spanish. Angrily they pulled a u turn and took us back to the hotel. As we pull up to the hotel we saw a bus ahead of us pulling away. This bus turned out to be the one we were supposed to go on we missed it by seconds. So we told the security guy who kinda freaked out when he heard what happened to us. Needless to say the security at the front of the lobby got much tighter after that. They eventually sent another ride for us for our actual tour. The tour itself was amazing I swam in a reef surrounded by hundreds of fish. Swimming with sharks was so insane I loved it I wish I had taken more pictures I would do this trip again in a second!
Saturday Day 8:
-Wedding day, hectic, crazy, getting tired of family want to strangle people. I really wish I could just be myself around my folks acting straight is so fucking tough right now, thank god there aren’t many hotties around this resort or I would be in trouble.
Sunday Day 9:
Home time I got a sun burn today after deciding I didn’t want to go home as pasty as I came. The airport went well the plane trip was a bit intense, it was pretty much turbulence for the whole trip. I think I am ok with flying now tho it doesn’t really bother me anymore.
Monday Day 10,
After spending 85 bucks to sleep in a hotel for 3 hours in Calgary we hopped a flight home and DAMN is it cold in this stupid place figures we come back and proceed to get the worst snow storm all year. I forgot how much I missed our food here, we ended up spending 50 bucks on McDonalds how disgusting is that lol but it wa soooooo good. Check out my pics if u want of the trip here
Posted by czarcub
at 12:51 PM MST
