According to one of my first guides, Alberto, this Godfather Street is where parts of the movie ” Godfather ” were filmed.
Alberto, who is missing one leg, but transports quickly, even with crutches,took me on a tour the other day to the Plaza Espana, which is close, and the Alcazar de Don Colon.
This Godfather street, like the famous Lombard Street in San Francisco, is already famous. We watch enough movies that movie streets become even more recognizable than the streets in our town.
This street is a tough walk, uphill, but not as tough as some. The little multicolored house fronts look traditionally Caribbean and a wine bottle stuck in one of the pedestrian rails looks like a good solution to sticking the bottle in your back pocket, or purse, or pitching in onto the street below.
The Godfather street this Monday afternoon is not busy. People at the bottom and top stand on corners to visit and a horse and carriage whisk past me as I snap a few mementos for Scotttreks.
This is a place the Godfather would have hung out, drinking and smoking a fine cigar while deciding the direction his crime organization was going to go.
Even in crime, you have to always be concerned with competition.
Dirty laundry catches up with all of us.
Only bringing a carry on suitcase this trip, and looking at my pile of dirty clothes on the bed, I am down to my last clean socks and shirt. I could have brought a bigger suitcase but I wanted to travel as light as I could. Doing with less always takes more imagination than taking the kitchen sink.
In my neighborhood, this lavenderia takes my dirty clothes in the morning, gives me a receipt, hands my clothes back clean, folded neatly in a plastic bag, after lunch. The charges are six bucks, which seems high, but, then again, someone has to deal with my clothes by hand. Putting them into the washer and dryer, unloading them, folding them nicely, putting them in a plastic bag, writing up the receipt, taking my money, takes human time and human effort.
It turns out, when I get back to the La Puerta Roja guesthouse, where I’m hanging my hat this trip, they have a washer and dryer I could have used for free, just paying for the detergent I use.
Since dirty laundry is a traveler’s constant companion, I resolve, next time to be patient, to ask before taking my dirty duds off the premises.
After all, dirty clothes don’t care how long they sit in a pile on the floor or whether they ever get clean.
Dealing with dirty clothes is one of life’s dirty little chores our mother’s warned us all about.
There are, according to the web, 1.2 billion Catholics in the world today.
This number, of course, changes every second because people are born and die every second and because counting anything is never easy.
This Cathedral, in the middle of the Zona Colonia, is striking and was the first church in the New World, built in the early 1500’s. It is a huge structure with thick fortress walls, high arching ceilings and carefully laid stones.There are stained glass windows high in the interior of the Cathedral and the worship area features a huge open sitting area used for mass plus six chapels on each side of the common hall. At one time, the remains of Christopher Columbus were interred here.
The Catholic church itself is one of Christianities monuments and, at one time, was a glue that held much of the world together. Religion tends to transcend country and the binding power of the church is well known to many of my friends who got their hands struck by a ruler when they didn’t learn their ABC’s in Catholic School, talked out of turn, or told a bad joke.
The Cathedral inside is so big, so tall, so heavy, so forceful, it makes me catch my breath.
This is a must see for anyone visiting the Zona Colonia. In this Cathedral, history speaks, without speaking,and, in silence, makes its strongest statements.
Pat reminds me to dig deeper into amber, when I’m in the Dominican Republic, highly valued by Kings and royalty way way back when we had Kings and royalty.
Tunneling deeper, I walk myself to the Museum of Ambar at 454 Calle Arzobismo Merino Street in the Zona Colonia, four blocks from the Plaza Colon.
Brunilda, standing inside the Museo’s front door, opens it as I reach for the door handle,and warmly welcomes me inside with a cheerful ” Good afternoon.” She leads me upstairs on a guided tour of the amber exhibit that gives me a history of the amber industry in the Dominican Republic.
For those who need a refresher on amber –
Amber is tree sap that has stuck around millions of years.
Jurassic Park popularized amber with its premise of bringing dinosaurs back to life by extracting blood from insects preserved in amber who had bit dinosaurs, then using dinosaur DNA inside the insect blood to create real dinosaurs.
Amber sometimes has bark, roots, leaves, vegetables, ants, termites, lizards caught inside it.
Amber comes in lots of colors, shapes and sizes.
“Blue Amber ” is found only in the Dominican Republic and if you hold ” Blue Amber ” up to light you see the blue tints.
Amber,dropped into a saline solution, floats. If the amber you have doesn’t float, it isn’t worth the price you paid for it.
After our tour, Brunilda escorts me to the museum retail store.
Even though I’m sold on amber, i don’t buy anything today.
Not taking money when I go on little expeditions is one of my best travel precautions
I want to see a movie about a tourist caught in amber who comes back to shopping life in the twenty third century.
The first thing he wouldn’t be able to buy would be a battery for his cell phone.
Having worked construction for years, customers have always appreciated a clean work place.
Construction sites go through a lot of stages and there are times when clean is the last thing on a builders mind. There are times it is best to leave a room dirty rather than clean it now and then re-clean it in several hours.
Still, the men who left this temporary sidewalk, on a downtown street, should get some kind of ribbon to pin on their T shirts.
Who says construction people can’t be tidy?
This, from where I am walking, is a sight to see.
The old and new world co-exist, sometimes shake hands, but more often ignore one another.
These kids are fundraising for a trip to Phoenix, Arizona for an International Hip-Hop Competition.
These seniors,sitting on green crates in the park,close to them, are seeing their peace and quiet taken over by the new world crashing in like rapping waves,
The Indians that saw Columbus might have felt the same way this old generation might be feeling right now.
In this world, there is room for everybody, but we need plenty of benches with some space between them.
At the Jardin Botanico in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, it is lunch time.
On the menu is one part indigenous people, one part Europeans, one part Hispanics, one part black Africans. Combine the European, African, Caribbean and Dominican recipe and you have a spicy melody served up with lots of spirit and joy.
The motto here is ” Don’t worry – Be Happy. ”
Most who live here try to live up to this motto.
Whether being happy is a genetic accident or learned behavior is a question learned psychologists are still trying to sort out.
I kept repeating the island motto over and over, and start feeling much better.
Much of what we worry about never happens anyway.
A ten minute taxi ride to the north of the Zona Colonia are the National Botanical Gardens of the Dominican Republic.
The gardens are huge and narrow city sidewalks are traded for wide foot paths to walk freely in wide open spaces This Sunday there is a long wavy line at the admissions gate, before opening time, and the charge to enter is just one hundred pesos -fifty cents U.S.
In the front entrance of the park, there is an orchid sale in progress and customers are carrying them in wheelbarrows to their vehicles in the parking lots. Orchids are very delicate beautiful flowers and it is explained to me, by my taxi driver, that they are very popular in the Dominican Republic. People hang them in their homes and show them on outside balconies. Whether it is Cuenca, Ecuador or the United States, or Santo Domingo, people love flowers and nature.
I can hear the city around me, but can’t see it inside the park’s cocoon of trees. Like the Botanical Gardens in Montevideo, this is prime real estate that people with foresight put on the protected list a long time ago.
Outside the huge cities of the world, however,nature still swings a big bat and the places people don’t want to live, can’t live, or don’t have the resources to go, are many.
Even in a world of seven billion people, there are places to escape humanity when you feel the need.
Even though the city is pressing around us on all sides, the Jardin is natural enough to lift us up this morning, remind us that this planet is still, with exceptions, a Garden of Eden.
Stewardship is mentioned in “Genesis”, in the Holy Bible.
Taking care of what we got should be on the top of everyone’s to do list.
Shadows begin to form in the early evening, thick stones in old city walls seem less heavy and ancient, a softness wraps itself around the Parque Colon, the Santo Domingo Cathedral, the bars, restaurants and hotels in the Zona Colonia.
This World Heritage old city is a well visited area, picked by Unesco to celebrate because of it’s culture and history. In the evening, the sun light switch turns down in slow degrees and people come out to sit on benches, visit, watch tourists, and enjoy the feel of a place where Christopher Columbus once walked.
Plaza Billini recognizes the efforts of a well loved and respected Catholic priest who founded hospitals and orphanages in Santo Domingo. Plaza Duarte celebrates one of the founders of the Dominican Republic who was, ironically, a poet, writer and activist instead of being just a military man brandishing a sword and riding a horse.
Tonight, there are bursts of life coming from all directions. There is the Chu Chu train passing our two plazas taking visitors for a tour, explaining dozens of important locations where important people in Dominican Republic history lived and played their part on life’s stage.. When you walk the streets here there are plaques on the walls of residences everywhere that remind you that these blank faced, neglected buildings once contained living breathing hero’s and heroine’s.
Staying in the Zona Colonia, even a few days, lets you forget International Airports, freeways, Interstates, sky rise apartments, business complexes, urban scrawl and our modern world.
Our modern world has gotten too quick, large, and complicated.
Sitting in a little Plaza, off the main business streets, makes my world more intimate, personal, and endearing.
When was the last time we wanted to hug New York cities tallest skyscraper?
Before seven in the morning, a kid passes me on his old bicycle, carrying a five gallon plastic bucket, with bait and tackle inside, on his bicycle handlebars. His fishing pole sticks out of an empty milk container secured to his back bike fender with a long bungee cord.
When the kid, who whizzes past me, makes a left turn towards the water, a block further down, I know for sure he is going fishing and joining another fisherman friend where the water meets the land.
There are fishermen on this jetty every morning, just at sunrise, and sometimes in the evening, at sunset. While you can catch fish other times of day, fisherman tell you exactly when the time is best to bait a hook, cast out, and wait for the fish to bite.
This Santo Domingo park, by the Napolitano Casino, will soon have its walkers and exercise people. City crews are putting down new sod and walkers, taking fresh air on a cool morning, can use a new swing set installed the other day by the parks and recreation department work crew. I watched some of the workers test the swing out, laughing, happy because it was almost quitting time.
At the end of the concrete jetty I am heading for, these two compadres already have their lines in the surf and are watching the sun come up over a not too distant shipyard as a ship steams past us towards the west.
Fishermen are eternally hopeful.
If you don’t try to catch anything, you won’t catch anything.
The kid’s bicycle is laid on the rocks close to him, and, if he is lucky and is using the right temptation, he will take some fish home for breakfast this morning, in his five gallon bucket with his bait, tackle, and pole still sticking out of the milk crate.
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