Sleeping in again today made me very happy. Between my love of having my head on a pillow and the excessive amount of drinking done last night (the final grande el Presidente is was really did me in) the extra few hours of sleep are just what the doctor ordered.

Bethany made a breakfast of eggs, tomato and cheese. We’ve been using essentially one spice when we cook, an adobo concoction of salt, garlic and oregano that we bought at one of the local markets. So, last night’s linguine tasted like today’s eggs.

Over the past few days, we’ve managed to use an entire three gallon between four people. You know, those office cooler jugs of water. We have one of those with a hand pump to dispense clean, safe water. You do not drink the tap water, especially as a tourist. Now, I’m sure we all use a lot more water on a daily basis for cleaning, showing, flushing and the like but this was essentially just for consumptive use. Drinking, brushing teeth, ice and such (we may have used a quarter of that for the ice of our Cuba Libres). So we asked for more water and found yet another small charge that we weren’t expecting. $5US is a small price to pay for the piece of mind of clean water.

After our lazy morning, we took the short walk north to the beach and spent a few hours out there. The water is beautiful. While not crystal clear, you can easily see your feet in five feet of water (which is funny, because without my glasses it didn’t really make much difference. Temperature wise, it is very warm, especially considering that it is winter here too! Most of the beach goers were tourists but there were quite a few locals too given that it is mostly a tourist beach and that it is winter. Floridians wouldn’t even think of going to the beach on days that their northern tourist think is great.

It also turns out that Sunday is the day that the locals go to the beach. Every Sunday the beaches are pack with local Dominicans with music, dancing and food. Many resorts discourage tourist from going to the beeches on Sundays. I’m not sure who that is designed to protect, the tourist from the locals or the locals good times.

Bethany and I took a walk down the beach and saw San Filipe from the other side of the bay. After we came back, we baked in the warm sun until Spencer and Alicia got back from their own wanderings. Making our way back to the resort, we washed off the salt from the ocean and waited for one of Bethany’s business associates who needed her services so badly that she came down to the Dominican Republic for a few days just to get a few extra hours of work from Bethany.

When Beth (Bethany’s associate) arrived, we all walked back to the beach to have lunch at one of the outdoor restaurants. I had some of the best goat that I’d ever had which strangely came with french fries. Beth and Bethany had some excellent sea bass, Alica had a tasty sweet curried chicken with pineapple and Spencer had a good old fashioned hamburger.

We had one of the strangest beggar experiences of the week so far. A young man with downs syndrome, pushing a wheelbarrow along the beach came up to Spencer and started talking. After a bit, Spencer tried to tell him that he didn’t understand, so the young man pulled out a handful of peso coins and started counting the on the table. After several different arrangements of the coins, Spencer counting along with the young man, Alicia gave him two peso coins and the young man lit up. He then lined up the pesos, counted up to the new total and gave Spencer a fist to pound in thanks. As he picked up his wheelbarrow, he said goodbye in several languages and headed on down the beach.

By the time we finished lunch, the wind had picked up and a chill was coming off of the waterfront so we walked back to the resort. Stopping along the way, we hit a grocery to get our third bottle of rum, some more coke and a few more el Presidentes. As I said before, we are on our way to putting down a bottle of rum a day. I also forgot to mention yesterday that el Presidente’s pilsner flavor reminds me of our old Pennsylvania favorite, Yuengling, the US’ oldest brewer.

Back at the resort, we got Beth settled and helped her with her iPhone’s data roaming problems and install CS3 on her laptop which she bought just for Bethany just for this trip knowing that we didn’t have a Mac with us. Another cuba libre in me, and Beth’s love of ecco friendly production, had me railing on everything from American consumerism to China’s political and environmental failings.

While Spencer and Alica took a nap and Beth and Bethany went back to the beach again to catch the sunset, I continued my attempt to blog this week. In all actuality, barring issues with me getting wireless working on an old Dell running Debian, I have been pleasantly surprised with my success. I’ve been using a beta of Google’s Picasa (which runs a custom wine session) to archive pictures from three cameras, clean up photos in Gimp, type up this blog with OpenOffice and run through several websites using IceWeasel. I’ve used Linux and *BSD for years as servers and specialized machines but I haven’t used it as a desktop because of my love of Mac OS X. If it wasn’t for my favor of Apple I could easily see myself using a UNIX-like OS as my daily computer. Debian has many of the things I like and need. Though it isn’t a *BSD, it takes many cues from it more so than other distributions. Even if Ubuntu is a more polished user experience, I think I will continue to use Debian for its raw qualities.

Okay, I’m back from my geek interlude…

For dinner we ate at the resort’s restaurant where they were having a fresh seafood night. Spencer had a grilled Red Snapper which was server whole and was absolutely gorgeous. The rest of us had the lobster. Each of us got two full lobster, one larger and one smaller, split in half and grilled with plenty of butter. More Cuba Libres for me! While we dined, we were serenaded by two local musicians. One played guitar and sang and the other played the accordion. The guitar player had an amazing memory for music and improvisation. He was able to conjure song that people requested out of thin air, if even from a hummed notes. He knew songs from all over.

One of the other guests, a beautiful black woman with great hair and a British accent, was surprised with a birthday cake and the birthday song in both English and Spanish. We were all served a piece of the cake which had a merang(sp?)-like icing and a pineapple preserve between layers.

After dinner, back in our villa, Bethany and Beth got to work, Spencer and Alicia got some more chill time and I pulled the day’s photos from our cameras.

Tomorrow should be the great day. Stay tuned.

PS. I just wanted to give a little props to Beans and Barley which came with us to the Dominican Republic in the form of Shoyu Almonds that we brought with is as a snack. Even here, Beans maintains its grip over us.
<a href=’http://glennkauffman.com/2008/01/29/relaxing-on-the-playa-beach/shoyu-almonds-from-beans-and-barley-down-in-the-dr/’ rel=’attachment wp-att-92′ title=’Shoyu Almonds from Beans and Barley down in the DR‘><img src=’http://glennkauffman.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/image1.jpg’ alt=’Shoyu Almonds from Beans and Barley down in the DR‘ />