Santiago de los Caballeros

I guagua’d on to the second largest city in the Republic, Santiago de los Caballeros. Sounds like a place where I’d fit right in!

My AirBnB here was nice – four bedroom apartment, AC, a view – and it wanted to hard to have hot water, I could really feel it.

Santiago had a lot to see and do. There were parks, and monuments.

  • This monument reminds me of me.
  • Yep, still.
  • The baseball stands here for hours to be mocked when they lose a game.
  • This park, outside the runway show, was set up as a Christmas wonderland.
  • More wonder.
  • This is in the middle of a park which serves as a tribute to women. Really.

There was an artsy neighborhood, with an interesting gallery.

I went on a tour of the Aurora cigar factory – a working factory, and it was pretty neat! But I confirmed that I am not a cigar smoker. I just couldn’t get the smoke going using only my mouth muscles. I’d make a poor street whore :(.

There is a wonderful neighborhood called Los Pepines, where the houses, walls and sidewalks are all colorfully painted and covered with murals. This was the best thing in Santiago – a joy to walk around.

There was a peaceful and pretty botanical garden.

  • Here’s some park.
  • Here’s where they keep their pile.
  • For mosquito breeding.
  • OK this is pretty cool. When you touch this plant
  • it does this. It hides.
  • Butterfly pavilion baby.

I even made it to a runway fashion show, which had clothes from a few different designers.

And of course a few neat-o places to eat and drink.

  • This place
  • had mofongo carbonara, take off the can
  • and blam!
  • Decent burger place.
  • Chill colmado balcony for a beer.
  • Columbian empanada place one block from where I lived.
  • I went grocery shopping and bought only weird things – a chocolate bar with corn flakes in it (not good), passionfruit (OK), raisins on the vine (almost as good as the ones in the box) and lime potato chips (better than I expected!)
  • I had no idea this is what a passionfruit looked like.
  • Found some decent barbecue.
  • Even threw Mickey D’s a bone…
  • they have chicken Big Macs!

As a final note, visual evidence that the Dominican Republic is full of barbed wire. It really is.