Day 3

This morning we were greeted by a stranger on our front room / porch. He had on a tank top, a knit cap, and a basket of fish. His name is Tito, and he brings the catch of the day door to door each day. He usually has dorado, calamari, or pain de coco - coconut bread, an unleavened bread sold everywhere here.

We took a gua-gua, the local public transportation, into Samana, the nearest city, where we though we could find a larger grocery store and stock up on foodstuffs. The gua-gua driver assured Amy that it was a big store. We have different definitions of big store – it was no bigger than anything we have in Las Galeras, nor did it have more stock. While checking out, we noticed a bowl of bite-sized, golden foil packets with silhouettes of chickens on them. We thought we’d buy 4, giving us all a first taste of an authentic Dominican candy treat. We left the store, and Amy and I opened ours first, popping them into our mouths and realizing they were bullion cubes.

On the return gua-gua ride, Amy made use of her Spanish to connect with several people on the ride, while I sat across from an older woman and a young boy who had a plastic toy gun that he pointed and pretended to shoot at many of the passengers, much to the delight of the older woman, who laughed as he pointed it and especially howled when he put it in his mouth and pretended to shoot.

The gua-gua stops wherever people need to get off. Riders just holler, and the truck / van pulls over. At one stop a particularly frail elderly woman, who was under 5 feet tall, got off, and motioned back to something in the van. One of the men on board got out a new television monitor – a big one – and put it on her shoulders. She then turned to head down an incredibly steep bank – it was easily steeper than 45 degrees, and I couldn’t see the house from the road, so I had no idea how far she had to go. Oh, did I mention she had high heeled shoes?

Amy lost her cell phone on the gua-gua, which we didn’t notice until we got home. She went back and talked to the group of men who operate the gua-gua’s from a small stand near the ocean, at the end of the main road in town. They said the gua-gua we rode in was gone, but they knew who it was and would get it back the next day.

TODAY’S BIG THOUGHT: how does one explain the concept of intellectual property rights to third world countries?

current reading – "Sugarball," by Alan Klein, "Emergency Sex and other Measures," by Kenneth Cain, Heidi Postlewait, and Andrew Thompson