Hi Everyone,
I know I haven't posted in a while and it's because I've been super busy with my thesis for the past little while. Brady and I decided to take a little vacation to the Dominican. We stayed at the Grand Oasis Marien in Puerto Plata (Playa Dorada) and definitely recommend it to anyone considering going to DR.
When we first arrived felt like a warm wall of moisture that hits you in the face, LOVED IT!
Here are the first pictures of the resort when we arrived. Sun! Sun! Sun! :)
The room they gave us originally ended up with a leaky ceiling in the bathroom. After a couple of hours (which is "Dominican Minutes" apparently) we were finally moved to another room and upgraded!! Our new room was gorgeous!! I'd give it ***** for sure.
This was the view from our building, facing towards the mountain (minus me of course).
So, I'm not one to just stick around the hotel, we both like to look around, so we took a taxi cab into Puerto Plata. Dominicans by the way are insane drivers. There are no traffic lights nor circles and stop signs are are more like yields. We did a left hand turn into two lanes of traffic heavy traffic, cut them off, and we weren't the only ones, there was a truck to our right and a van to our left, that's right, THREE vehicles turning left into a one lane road in heavy traffic. I honestly thought we were going to the hospital and was now freaking out about the location of our insurance papers.
Once we arrived at our destination, the cable cars or "telerifico", we are once again bombarded by people looking trying to get money off of us, by some sort of means, either, guided tours, free gifts, annoying three man bands... you always had to be on guard. Luckily Brady is much more firm about this sort of thing than I am, I'm such a sucker, especially for kids (and the little buggers know it too!).
The top of the mountain was covered in clouds when we went... and it continued to be that way for the majority of our trip.
The top of the mountain was like a rain forest, it was so beautiful!
This country is very poor, most of the houses are really small, without glass panes for windows (only shutters) and tin roofs. We have more pictures of the local homes and customs but they are on our disposable camera which has yet to be developed, and probably won't be for a little while since we have 15 more pictures to take.
Later on in the week we also went zip lining, which is totally awesome fun! I'm actually going to see if we have something like this here in Canada *Note to self, google this.
Pictures of the Zip line are also on the disposable camera. We didn't want to risk losing our good camera.
Back at the resort this was our "partial ocean view" which was still pretty nice. Oh, and they serve Coca-Cola in glass bottles!!! It doesn't taste like Canadian Coke either, it's so much better!!
Here is the view of the beach. We don't like the ocean much so we mostly stuck to swimming in the pool (which was cooled I think, or so it seemed).
Anyhow, this was our trip to the Dominican, we had a great time (except for the day that I got sick from the food), but other than that it was different than the usual, and very relaxing.
