So I’ve got to say something about the food because it’s so important on our trips J. First of all, Dominican food is not like Mexican food. Dominicans don’t make tortillas, don’t eat tacos, don’t have refried beans, and don’t eat much spicy stuff. Instead, the main staples of Dominican cuisine are rice, beans, and chicken (arroz, habichuelas, y pollo) – a dish known as the Dominican flag – which they eat pretty much every day. And I can see why – Dominican beans and rice are amazing. At each meal we also had bread, fresh fruit (including pineapple, mango, apple, bananas, and grapes), salad, and various deserts. I usually eat to much because there are so many good options.
While we always eat breakfast at the hotel, all of our lunches are prepared by a Dominican woman named Suni (sp?) and a group of other women. So we got awesome, homemade food pretty much every single day. Sometimes during the week she’ll make American food like spaghetti (or as they say, espaghettis) for the sake of those who don’t love Dominican food and our GI tracts, but it’s just as good. We certainly do not starve while we’re there.
For dinners we have several different things throughout the week. The first night we have Papa John’s (Papa Juan’s, we call it), on Sunday nights we go to Jumbo (food court), one night Suni makes fried chicken which we eat at the hotel, one night we go out to a Chinese restaurant, and another night we tour the colonial zone and eat at a restaurant there. On Wednesday nights, we have completely American food, as we grill hamburgers and bratwursts before going to church. As you can see, there’s plenty of non-Dominican food in there so we don’t get bored.
One of our favorite foods they have in the Dominican comes from a frozen yogurt chain called Yogen Fruz. At Yogen Fruz, you have a whole freezer full of ingredients to choose from (from berries to mango to pineapple to chocolate), then what you choose is put in a machine with plain frozen yogurt and completely ground up and mixed in. So, basically, you create your own flavor of frozen yogurt, and you can put different things together, say, strawberry, raspberry, and caramel, or whatever. I think we calculated that there are over 40,000 combinations if you can pick up to three things to put in. Anyway, it’s amazing, and we’re banking one it coming to the US very soon.
Despite any precautions we could take, it seems almost no one on staff escaped getting sick at some point, mainly with nasty, evil GI crud involving nausea, fever, and the body attempting to empty itself from both ends. And apparently they still have colds in the tropics, because a few others got what the Dominicans call “la gripe”, which is anything that involves cold or flulike symptoms. Really, they have colds in the tropics? Then there were those select few fortunate, blessed ones who never got sick. I got sick at the end of the first week with the abovementioned Montezuma’s Revenge. Then, in just one weekend, more than half of the staff (about 12 people) got sick at some point, some pretty badly. We had eaten dinner in the hotel restaurant, which we never do, and it was apparently a bad idea. We do have one funny story that came out of it, however, when two girls became really sick in the same room. At one point, one of them, Katherine, happened to be throwing up in the bathroom. The other, Mallory, wasn’t feeling great, so she went outside for some fresh air. Of course, while she was out on the balcony she suddenly needed to throw up, and so, the bathroom being taken, where else was she to puke but off the balcony on the two floors’ balconies below? Later on, the exact same thing happened, but with their places switched. Oh, the poor maids on the lower floors. From what I hear, that many people getting sick over the course of a trip – or at least all at once – doesn’t normally happen. At least we can look back now and laugh about it!
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