Bienvenidos

Day #1-Bienvenidos!

That means welcome in Spanish. Obviously, today is my first day in the country. After the chaos, also known as Miami airport, everything went smoothly. There were about 16 people from my program on the flight, all but one were girls. The views from the plane were so pretty. There were palm tree covered mountains everywhere. When we landed, the airport was pretty small so we got our bags quick and then exited customs (they just let us leave, and they didn’t even check any of the CIEE people’s bags). After that the director, Lynne, and the other staff of CIEE met us. Then we got on a guagua (Dominican bus) and headed up to Camp David. Oh, forgot to mention that the man loading our luggage rolled my bag over my toe and made it bleed. Back to the story, we drove on the main highway of the country, Autopista Duarte, and we drove through town a little bit. It is a pretty big city, with lots to learn and explore! When we entered the foothills of the mountains, we had to turn off the air conditioning to have enough power to get up the hill…pretty funny. Camp David is a hotel that is on top of the mountains that overlook the valley (Santiago). It is such a nice hotel, it even has wireless internet in the lobby. We got paired up with one other person to be roommates with for the night. My roomie is a girl named Natasha from California, but goes to school somewhere on the east coast. She’s nice. For anyone who understands, yes NB. We have a huge bedroom almost twice the size of mine in Colorado. We have a balcony, 2 queen beds, couch, table and chairs, shower with no hot water, and a tv. After we got checked in, we all just hung out and got on our laptops. Dinner was at 6:30 at the hotel restaurant with a huge room all to ourselves. We had a buffet with great food; casserole with ground beef and plantains, salad (way different then American salad), pasta salad, chicken, rice, fruit, and flan. Then we had to play ridiculous icebreakers to attempt to know each other’s names and get to know one another. The people are very interesting and different. Sara is the other girl from CU that I just met today, who seems a lot like me. One of the boys (don’t know his name), Sara, and I went down to the bar after dinner and had a beer before bed. We have a whole week of orientation starting tomorrow at 9am, but we get to meet our families on campus tomorrow. I can’t wait!! My family is in the district of town that is a 25-minute walk from campus, but rumored to be the really nice neighborhood. I think I would rather have nice house and a walk☺ Well, I hope I am not leaving anything out that you would want to know (if I am, just post comments). I’m off to bed…end of a long day, and I am tired!