Santiago

We just arrived in Santiago and are cheked into our hotel! The bus ride was pretty good! It took us over an hour to get across the boarder, and 8 hours from the time we left COTP to get here. We were given food on the bus which was great because we hadn’t eaten breakfast or lunch. Our favorite part is when they decided they were going to give us all pop, so they passed out used plastic Royal Carribean cups to pour it into! I decided to pass, but Nick drank his sprite anyway!

It is really weird coming across, because the Dominican side is way nicer than the Haiti side. It’s like night and day. Haiti is covered in trash and all the houses are falling apart. The DR is clean with paved roads and nice houses.

Last night we tried looking up hotels to stay in tonight, but the internet was so slow that we only found one hotel. We were hoping to find a hole in the wall because we don’t want to spend much money and we are leaving at 2am anyways. This place is really fancy, but it was the only hotel name we knew and since we don’t know Spanish couldn’t ask for any cheaper ones. When we got here, I asked the guy at the front desk for the cheapest room and we were put into the “Deluxe Plus” room. When we got there, it had not been cleaned, so they down graded us to another room that is not nearly as fancy. We are fine with this and hope that this room will be quite a bit cheaper but we will see!

When we first arrived in Haiti two weeks ago, we had a hard time not saying ci and gracis. After spending so much time speaking Creole, it’s hard not to say wi and meci! I wanted to say bye to some kids at the boarder, but couldn’t remember how to say it in Spanish until I got on the bus!

Off to find some lunch and see the town!

Nikki