27 Waterfalls

Mike and Steve came down from Seattle for Spring Break and I knew this would be a good chance to finally do the 27 Waterfalls excursion. Just south of the town of Imbert, about 45 minutes from Cabarete, lies a giant Brugal rum sign which marks the inconspicuous entrance. Dropping off the freeway onto a dirt road that runs through a sugar cane field, you drive for a few minutes before reaching a very nice and reportedly very new reception area, guide cabin, restaurant, giftshop, etc. -- profoundly more than the ticket shack that existed just a year ago. After securing a guide and deciding on the full 27 waterfalls option, the three of us set off for a 3hour tour up a series of waterfalls and pools stretching appoximately 4km up into the hills. The path crisscrosses confusingly through dense forest, streams, and waterfalls and would be nearly impossible to navigate without a guide. Each of the guides does only one trek per day - ours was great and his gutsy six-year-old son joined us for the fun, adding that element of "well, if a six-year-old just did it..." The largest drop was perhaps 35 or 40 feet, a bit farther (and obviously into shallower water) than usual because of the lack of significant rainfall over the past few months. Ailing, being preggers and not able to join us, advised from her first time at the waterfalls a year ago that we should arrive early in the morning and be the first ones up and down. We did so and didn't see another soul until we were almost all the way down and started running running into the large groups of 20+ people coming from Cabarete as part of the Iguana Mama Adventure Tours. Being there early insured that we were able to do the jumps as many times as we wanted and the guide was able to take his time explaining the flora and fauna to us. I can now share the sentiment with the others I have met who have exclaimed, "27 Waterfalls one of the coolest things you can do in DR."

Family Foto

Ever since Built to Spill's first album came out back in the early 90's (see below), I always wanted to do a dorky "family" photo. Here are the results. The "daughters" in the back row are our friends Tina, Amanda, and Noreen, each of whom is trying to portray a child in a certain family birth order and Ailing and I are being the proud Dominican parents. This was actually meant to be a Christmas card photo but given the mail service here in the DR, you can imagine how far they got...

Baby Richaccia

Niño o niña? You be the judge; we're just gonna wait 'til July and find out. 19.5 weeks along and counting. All systems go and measurements within normal limits - it's like flying to the moon... ;)

36 - you just gotta make it look good

My good friend Stacy (looking short in the first foto) and I have b-days two days apart, so we decided to celebrate 'em together. After a fine Italian meal at Il Capo, we headed over to the famous Embajador casino (where some scenes in The Godfather II were filmed) for some gambling. Roulette was a no go for but blackjack treated me just fine.

10K - Hot and Sunny "Winter" Running

I pulled off my second timed 10k in around 52 minutes, 10 minutes less than my last one. Now if I can just shave off about 7 more minutes, I might actually beat that ba$tard Jeff Dungan (pictured with the donut).

SUPER SUNDAY FLAG FOOTBALL

Every Super Bowl Sunday at CMS is initiated by an early afternoon flag football game followed by a nice trip to Colmado Los Muchachos for some ice cold Presidente'. This year, the good guys in red won and I even pulled down two fairly sweet catches for touchdowns to earn MVP honors (truthfully, my friend Tasha (with the seattle u shirt on) deserved it for her stellar running and catching). Then, the Giants beat the Pats and all was right with the universe.

euro vaca 2

A few more fotos from the Europe. Most of these were taken on short day trips from where Ali and Paul live in the southern Netherlands: a trip to Maastricht and their great Christmas market and then over to Belgian city called Liege which is sort of akin to Glasgow - very industrial, but with an exciting downtown. Liege had loudspeakers set up all over the city center which blasted strange things in French; it was like having an afternoon story teller from on high. The narrator caused the Sunday pub denizens to periodically raise their glasses and say or sing phrases at the top of their lungs in unison - it was surreal. By looking at the last foto I am sure you are wondering... ok, we were tempted but didn't actually eat at "Hamburger Restaurant"!

Euro vaca with ali and paul - Berlin

All fotos are from our first ever trip to Berlin. After a long, long trip from the DR (Santo Domingo -- NYC -- London -- Amsterdam by plane and then Amsterdam -- Landgraff by train - Ailing had already been there for a week after doing Thanksgiving in Denver) we all caught about 5 hours of sleep and then hit the road for Berlin. What should have taken 5.5 or 6 hours from Paul and Ali's place in Landgraf in the south Netherlands took more like 10 because of traffic (needless to say, I was mighty sick of travelling at that point). We rented an apartment for three days, braved the bitter cold, ate copious amounts of brats and pomme fritz, and fell in love with the place.

fotos from DR - Tropical Storm Noel

The rains raged for 5 days straight and as you can clearly see from the photos, have devastated many parts of the country, particularly on the southern coast. The storm was projected originally to miss the DR and only hit Haiti and then turned unexpectedly; all government agencies were basically caught off guard.

Murder Mystery Party

Now... the new librarian

Well, it has certainly been a big shift to go from English teacher to librarian, but here I am doing two very important things for our facility that I have recently mastered: 1) providing a positive expression of library enthusiasm, and 2) modeling reading behind a relevant backdrop of pop-culture iconography (this was actually part of a joke between another teacher and myself). We are in the middle of a big "celebrity reader" poster project and had teachers from all three schools (elementary, middle, and high) pose with books that we will then be hanging all over the school in an effort to promote reading (kids here are NOT generally readers).
More updates from la biblioteca soon!

book recommendation

Fans of Dave Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius + You Shall Know Our Velocity) and/or readers who are looking for an inventive and powerful book should get ahold of a copy of What is the What which tells the story of Valentino Achak Deng, a member of the thousands-strong Sundanese Lost Boy diaspora. Eggers interviewed Deng and tranformed the interviews into a first person "autobiographical" account even though the book is billed as a novel. Eggers and Deng admit that certain aspects of the story have been reorganized and some moments amended for the sake of cohesion, but it is for the most part a very accurate account of Deng's 15 year survival of the Sudanese civil war by eventually travelling to Ethiopia and then to the U.S. in 2001. As moving a read as the book is, I was equally stunned to find out the following: "All of the proceeds from What Is the What will go to aiding the Sudanese in America and Sudan. Created and overseen by Valentino, the Foundation's first aim will be the rebuilding of his hometown of Marial Bai, in southern Sudan. Every purchase of the book constitutes a donation to The VAD Foundation." In addition to the altruistic task of starting several teen writing centers around the U.S. using proceeds from his first two books, it's so impressive to see an author take his work to the next level to actually improve the state of the world around him - Eggers is quite a guy.
You can read more at:
http://www.valentinoachakdeng.com/
http://store.mcsweeneys.net/index.cfm/fuseaction/catalog.detail/object_id/B769DBC1-5B6F-4EBC-83FF-777C21AF0F0B/WhatIstheWhat.cfm

El Limon Waterfall

20 minutes east of Las Terrenas on the Samana Peninsula lies the little town of El Limon that we were told offers access to a beautiful waterfall, and after three days in our overly sedate beach environs, the time has come for some adventure. "Some dudes on motorcycles will just see you coming and will guide you to where the horses are," rings in my ears as the guy on a white bike makes eye contact with me and asks "El Limon?" to which I nod. We follow him to the south and soon we are pulling onto a steep, narrow road, rolling past a number a little farms with more chickens than seem plausible. We then see groups of horses that are being draped in plastic sheeting as an afternoon cloudburst opens up. We are ushered into a parking spot just past the horses and the guide group's leader just nods at me and says "diez minutos, no problema." Sure enough, 9 minutes later, the rain stops and we are negotiating a price for our crew. Each person is assigned a horse and a guide (ranging in age from 14-67) and then the clip clop of trotting is all we hear. The trail is rocky, uneven, and so steep at in sections that one of the horses in our group falls to all four knees but the guides assist it in standing and is thankfully uninjured. We stop about 1/4 mile from the waterfall and we finally catch a glimpse of it and understand what the recommendations were all about: rather than a more or less "solid" stream of water pouring off a cliff, this is broken up into a hundred fingers that trickle over the moss and jutting rocks. We leave the horses and with the help of the guides and a shakey handrail, we make it down the last few feet of the slick trail to the base of the fall where many visitors are taking a swim in the spill pool. I join in and am treated to an amazing sight while floating on my back of gallons of water falling from 60 feet above me. You can also swim behind the fall and duck into a little cave and enjoy the sound of all that water coming down. The nag of responsibility tugs at me as I remember the evening's scheduled fish fry and our as yet unbegun contribution to it, and realize it time to head back. After we clamber back up to the horse post, we see that our mounts are rested and fed and we let them confidently return us to the car.

The Moca Route

We've been using a new route to get to the north shore of the island which runs up and over a windy mountain pass through a town called Moca and allows one to be privy to a host of Dominican sights and sounds rarely seen in most other spots. Our first time taking it was on the way home from another sun and surf soaked weekend in the party town of Cabarete. Driving up two days before, we took the typical route through Santiago which produced, as it always does, a series of SNAFU turns that get you so far encsconsed in the belly of the town that you may as well rent an apartment and live there for a month or two. We knew that we couldn't handle another pass through Santiago on the way home so got good directions to go through Moca. As you leave Cabarete, you can see the green mountain whose pass you will be ascending just to the south of you and you wonder if your little car and its 1/2 cylinder can handle it. Los Brasos (the arms) is the first town drivers pass through and we promise ourselves to come stay at some point at the rumored-to-be amazing Blue Moon resort to be treated to a 6 course Indian feast. As we climbed in elevation, it was quickly obvious to us that we were in for a beautiful drive; the challenge with mountain driving, though, is of course to take in the strange and beautiful scenery while making sure you don't go careening off the edge of a cliff in mid-gawk and this is doubly true of The Moca Route as travellers must also contend with myriad road hazards - both moving and stationary - that suprise you faster than a springtime Seattle sunbreak. One of our favorite sights (and one that is often tough to catch on film because I usually feel like a putz taking peoples' pictures without their permission, and because we are in a moving vehicle, besides) is the bee hive of rollers on Dominican womens' heads. These heads of colorful rollers are ubiquitous on the Moca route and it seems to be the activity of the day for nearly all women, young or old. The men seem to be much more inclined to race their motorcycles or scooters at insanely high speeds up and down the narrow highway, often positioning themselves in "super man" pose with their stomachs on the seat and legs sticking straight out over the back tire - it's crazy to watch. The route takes drivers through dozens of blink-of-an-eye villages, each hosting a few domino games, colmados blasting enough bass to rip your face off, and a few dozen dogs - all female - with painfully swollen teets. Before we knew it, we had crested the pass; the valley spread out wide and yawning before us, its lushness breathtaking. A few minutes of brake-testing decline and we have reached the bottom of the hill and are on the Duarte heading for home.