Old Gold

Sunday was full of adventure.

The beach plan fell through since we woke up to rain. Instead, since it started to look a little nicer out, we made a plan to take Paula to the Colonial Zone (plus I wanted to take pictures of it during the day). The plan was that Paula would meet Maria and I at Nacional. When Maria and I left the apartment it was, once again, pouring rain. In the two blocks it took for us to get to a carrito, we had very wet feet and shoes.

We waited at Nacional for about an hour before we heard from Paula (she doesn’t have a cell phone yet). It turns out she had gotten confused and went to a different Nacional on Gomez instead of the one on Lincoln. But all was not lost. Maria and I did take time to enjoy a coffee at Nacional. We ended up going to the hotel by Paula’s place and just meeting her there. And then… we were off!

It actually turned out to be a nice day once we arrived and as such, we proceeded to walk around, took some pictures, checked out some of the historic buildings and then had pizza. After that, we headed back to my apartment so that Paula could learn where Pavol and I live. On the way, Paula told us that in Costa Rica they eat green mangos with salt. Since we were passing a tree with said green mangos, she picked some and then made it for us when we arrived at the apartment. Tasty!

Maria then took Paula to get some more stuff for her place at Nacional and I had the great plan of napping. However, Quentin and Jody ended up coming over to do some rum tasting with Pavol, and some how, I ended up rum tasting with them for the rest of the evening. Pavol opened up one of his best bottles of rum.  Prior to which I had to take several glamour photos of it...  I'm the unofficial photographer for the DRA (Dominican Rum Addicts) now.  We also tried hard to be true connoisseurs but that led to a lot of random descriptions of the look, taste, after-burn, etc. including Quentin's color description of "Old Gold."  Details and photos should be on Pavol's blog soon.  Needless to say, we had a lot of fun and I ended up being very tired this morning.

It is extremely humid today. I woke up and everything felt damp. Yuck. At 1:00pm today, when I went for lunch, it was 29 degrees out, but with humidity, 41. Also, JCL gave me some “literature” on the bible this morning. I’m not exactly sure why…  she said I should read it.  But my assumption is that she would know how much Spanish literature I'm surrounded by at work if I just wanted to work on reading Spanish... so perhaps she thinks I need to learn more about the bible. 

J didn't get into the office until I was back from lunch.  Then he took an hour lunch break.  When he finally got back he started singing loudly along to his music.  He is not a good singer at all.  That and it was a female vocalist singing a sort of easy listening yet passionate ballad...

I also had an excellent dinner tonight.  I cooked up some asparagus and had pasta with a really good roasted garlic sauce I found the other day.  MMM.