Come Fly With Me: Dos!

This is the second blog after my first post about my family vacation to Dominican Republic.

Apologies for the MANY dog photo's.

P.s. Not all photo's were taken by me. Many were taken by my sister, Farhana.

Luna

They're SUCH posers.

Jet. LAGGED.

The happy couple: Hamlet & Melissa

Dodgy hair conditioner

POP TARTS!

As I mentioned in the first blog, we had left the Canon camera battery charging at home in Cape Town (I had to resort to using our small Nikon digital camera to take photo's). So whilst we were in Santiago, my sister did some research on the web and found a manufacturer in Miami that sells camera batteries. Luckily for us, my aunt lives in Miami and she would be coming down to DR in the next few days, so we phoned her and she got us a battery and brought it with her.

My mother's cousin lives in Orlando, and we found a company there that sells battery chargers. Once again we were lucky enough to get him to buy us a charger and bring it with him when he came down to DR. And voila, we had our camera back.

The moment we got a usable camera battery

The would-be flower girls

Reppin'

Bouquet my cousin Melissa used at her pre-wedding photoshoot. More on that later.

My little cousin ain't a half-bad photographer

So I've just realised that many of you probably don't even know where Dominican Republic is. If that be the case, it's a small country between North and South America, and shares the same land as Haiti:

It's not a really big country so travelling between cities took just a few hours. We spent most of our time in the urban area of Santiago, where my cousins live. Their parents live in the more rural village of Constanza (my mother's home town), near La Vega:

A couple days after the wedding (promise I will do a separate blog post on this later), we took a trip to Hamlet's uncle's vacation house near the capital, Santo Domingo. 

It's a 2-story house on a big plot designed for entertaining many guests. It is BIG and spacious. We swam, ate good food, played games, danced, and listened to some awesome music into the wee hours of the morning. About 30 people slept over that night.

'God bless our home'

An acerola. It's a cherry

Our lunch. Not even kidding.

TURTLES. Urg. Love them.

This is their own personal pond. For lunch, they also served us some fish from it. I KID YOU NOT.

If one were to shop for a souvenir from DR, these houses would be what to get.

Our tour guide, Camil.

Spot the lizard.

SKILL

My gran with all her daughters.

Abuela. Mami. Tia.

We came in two cars. A couple of us stayed over at the ranch for the night whilst everyone else headed back to Santiago.

Domino is pretty big in DR. These are definitely MY kind of people.

This is what 3am looks like.

How beautiful is my aunt?

Remember those damn chickens? They sure made themselves known at 5am the next morning. 

We hit the road around 6:30am

Because my aunt & uncle live in Constanza, near to where the ranch is, they dropped my sister, my cousin Marielissa, and me, off at a taxi station that would take us the rest of the way to Santiago.

Did I mention the taxi squeezed in 20 people into a 13-seater? You can't tell by this photo because some had already been dropped off by the time this was taken.

DAMMIT. Missed it by 4 days.

I do NOT do sleep-deprivation well

*Ahem* FUNNY story about this photo. Just as we got back into Santiago, we needed to catch a taxi back to the apartment, so I jumped in the front seat of the taxi, relieved to have some personal space back. Not 10 seconds later, this mama opens the door and squeezes in next to me.  Brilliant.

Even though we were exhausted, it was still a great way to see how many people there travel between towns.I especially appreciated the experience because I got a sense of what life was like for my mother when she was young.