Halloween Dominican Style

Even though Halloween registers barely more than a blip on most Dominicans' holiday radar screens, my colleague Daryl and his wife Virginia host an annual Halloween bash in their beautiful top floor apartment near the U.S. Embassy. Four of us came up with a plan to be Mexican wrestlers and spent some hard-earned cash buying beautiful fabric to create costumes of which Nacho Libre would be jealous. Every half hour or so at the party, we would initiate a match (and thus becomming "those people" that everyone must watch out for at parties) and wrestle one another or innocent by-standers to the ground using a particular specialized move that matched our names: Atomic Pedro, Hombre Handler, Senor Smash, and Lethal Labios. Everyone was reminded once again not to let Mark on the dancefloor with a beverage as my butterfingers just can't hang on to anything while trying out new Merengue moves (especially in costume, for gawdsakes). Unfortunately, my friend Lissa took a nasty fall to the elbow before a towel arrived to swab up the mess. Those revelers who remained at the party to the end were treated to a huge steaming bowl of delicious Dominican soup called Sancocho that put each of us to bed happy.

Ghoul Bowl

CMS held its annual "Ghoul Bowl" ultimate frisbee round robin tournament yesterday, and my very own team 'Stache pulled out an amazing comeback when we were down 6 to 1 in the final round in order to secure a first place finish. Almost all members of the team sported a special 'stache inspired by famous moustaches of the last century and had t-shirts to match (Gallagher, Ernest Hemingway, Frida Kahlo, Salvador Dali, Ron Jeremy, Tom Selleck, etc.); undoubtedly, these 'staches were the source of our power. Play was inspired and tough and as the tournament organizer said in the post-game news post on the offical tournament website, "It was the best disc ever played at CMS." Throughout the game, ominious lightning bolts and rumbling thunder threatened to make the Ghoul Bowl a mud bowl, but it held off so that the proper team could win the tournament without having to run with 6 pounds of Dominan mud clinging to each shoe.

It is hard not to think about the fact that if this sort of activity were taking place right now in Seattle, we would regard it as our season-ending hoorah and begin hunkering down for the winter wait -- not so here in the Dominican. In fact, this signifies that our season is now truly up and running and that all trades and labor negotiations are taken care of and teams are ready to get on with the business of playing hard for the next, oh, 7 months. And now that the humidity is just about within tolerable limits, we expect the level of play to increase dramatically.

Tuscan Village in the Dominican Republic?

Today we drove a couple of hours east of Santo Domingo on Highway 3 and tooled around an interesting place known as Altos de Chavon which is a kitchy 17th century, Tuscan-styled village that a guy built for his daughter many years ago (http://www.altosdechavon.com/fs_village.htm). Altos de Chavon borders the largest all-inclusive resort on the island known as Casa de Campo and serves as its "high culture" alternative to body shots and golf. All the limestone that was used for the faux-Tuscan village project was imported, and the location, at least when it was built, was in the middle of nowhere, so the logistics and cost must have been a monumental challenge. For lunch, we had some wonderful pizza pie and enjoyed the stunning view of the Rio Chavon while a feral cat tried to attack Salvador (and it may have been just flirting, who knows?). Ailing and I missed our 15 minutes of fame by about, well, 15 minutes, as we were approached by a French documentarian who was working for the Discovery Channel to make a show about Altos de Chavon. She was going to buy us lunch and interview us, but the bill was just being delivered and her camerman declared that the clouds were creating imperfect light. We tried to convince her that our inner radiance would correct any lighting problems, but her Gallic reasoning won out.

We then drove down to a former fishing village called Bayahibe and got to experience the local vs. gringo beach division (see last foto). For the hour we were relaxing on the tiny, crowded beach, there was one white guy hanging out on the loooong stretch on the other side of the rope. As with much of the island, the weathly resort developers leave a little strip of the land for the Dominicans to enjoy and rent the rest out at nightly rates to the tourists -- ahhh, what an industry! Technically, it is illegal to "ban" anyone from a stretch of Dominican beach but given that the resort security guards wield very tough-looking shotguns, I doubt the casual beach-going local is going to raise much of a fuss.