phytophotodermatitis

Here's a little cautionary tale for you: on wednesday the 21 we had a religious holiday, Día de la Altagracia. So of course, we went to the beach. At the beach, we thought it would be a good idea to have a little rum with lime. This, however, turned out to be one of the worst ideas in the universe, especially for me. You'd think it was the rum that was the problem, right? Oh no, the rum was my best friend compared with that cute little green citrus I thought I loved so much. Evidently, if you have citrus juice on your skin and you come in contact with strong and direct sunlight, it causes a special kind of burn called phytophotodermatitis. I woke up on thursday with a little redness and stinging around my mouth-- and by the time I went to bed my mouth and chin were a painful and disgusting mess of blisters and scabs. I think (hope) it looks a lot worse to me than it does to every one else, and it's getting better, but oy vey, I hope you never end up in this situation. I doubt I'd have been much worse off if I kissed a hot burner.

Other than that, though, I'm doing well! Half (3) of my classes have started-- one is Latin American Literature at the Bonó Institute, and the other two are just advanced Spanish and Dominican Language and Culture at FLACSO, where the CIEE program offices are. Those last two are just with other students from my program, but the Language and Culture class is exciting because about a third of the classes will be field trips around the city. The literature class is more intimidating because it's at a real Dominican institute, not to mention an all men's school (for some reason female exchange students are allowed to take classes there, though). Even more interestingly, the vast majority of the all-male student body are studying to become priests! Knowing that, I didn't expect to meet quite such an outgoing, unorthodox, silly, and incredibly friendly group (not that I didn't expect them to be friendly, I suppose). The point is, these boys have been amazingly open and so nice to the confused gringos who invaded their institute, and I don't think the class will be too hard, either. I took a similar class at Lewis & Clark last semester, which should help, as well.


In other news, last weekend nine girls from my program and I went to the beach town of Las Terrenas on the Samaná peninsula for two nights. It was quite an adventure-- from the two men who shoved us all in the back of their pickup truck to drive us into town trying to suck all of our wallets dry (it's hard to seem really savvy and local here when you're in a largely white group of 10 girls, but with our spanish skills, we do our best) to the monsoon of rain that bombarded us during the pickup truck ride, to riding (underfed-looking) horses and mules up a muddy, rocky mountainside past breathtaking views of tropical wilderness to the enormous Limón waterfalls, where we swam in the pool and under the falls and into the caves behind the falls. Hispaniola is totally like Never Never Land-- there's lagoons and lost boys and pirates (sort of) and indians (you could say) and probably mermaids, too. Unfortunately our trip corresponded with the worst weather we've had since we've been here, but we found ways to make it fun... we played baseball with a stick on the beach and went swimming in the middle of the night and played games in the hotel room and went out dancing. Vale la pena.

I'm also really glad because Doña Iris's 19-year-old granddaughter Daniela has been staying with us these last couple of days and she's super fun to hang out with. She spent last year in Germany (she now speaks spanish, english, french and german... so jealous), so it was fun to talk about that, but like I told her it's pretty much impossible for me to form a sentence in german right now because I spend so much time trying to think and speak in spanish. But hey, THAT's getting better! I keep getting comments like, ¨what, you're American? But you can speak Spanish so well!¨I don't know if that means I'm good at Spanish or that Americans are supposed to be really ignorant). Daniela and my friend Aly and I have also started going to the yoga class that Doña Iris's son-in-law Victor teaches, which is another really lucky thing. When the weather is nice it's held on the roof of a nearby high school, under the stars and in perfect breezy warm weather. It's amazingly relaxing and wonderful.


This weekend is a long weekend since there's ANOTHER holiday on monday in honor of Juan Pablo Duarte (look it up if you're interested, I have to do it eventually). Tomorrow some friends and I are going to a Dominican music festival in Cabarete, which is a northern beach town famous for kite-surfing, which I will unfortunately (sort of) not be participating in. Aly, Hali and I are luckily traveling and staying with another grandchild of Doña Iris, Gabriel (Victor's 25-year-old son). I'm hoping it will be really fun and that I can manage to be creatively frugal with my pesos. Whoever's reading this, I really miss you, and I wish you could visit. Soon I'll tell you more about classes and whatever internship I end up with. Until then, all my love,

Anna Joy