Off to Explore a Cave!

So the next week was full of more homework and projects and group presentations, as, unfortunately, usual. But that weekend, I went with Lynne, the director of our program, to her cave, which is a few miles outside of Santo Domingo, although it takes about an hour to get from Santo Domingo to the cave and her house next to the cave, due to the stereotypically bad Dominican roads. Lynne's cave is in Las Piedras, which is in the campo and is a very poor area of the Dominican Republic. Her house at the cave is next door to Leidy's family. Leidy also works for CIEE, is a student at PUCMM, and she and her son live with Lynne in Santiago. The first night we got there, Lynne and I went over to Leidy's sister's house for dinner, and I met some of the kids that live there. They are some of the cutest kids I have ever seen! One girl, Cristina, decided to fix my hair for me, so she gave me many braids, similar to how many Dominican children wear their hair.

Attractive, no? That night, I also played games with the boys, including a Dominican version of "Down By the Banks", which is called Mickey Mouse. Unfortunately, I taught them the English version, and they kept asking me to sing it all night long! The only part of the song they picked up on was "hanky panky," so they kept walking around singing that. It was adorable!

The next day, we went exploring in Lynne's cave. The cave is enormous, with 17 rooms that we know of, although there are branches that have not been explored yet. There are also Taino pictographs in the cave, which is pretty awesome! One of the rooms has a lake in it, and you can swim, although we didn't this trip. But the entire CIEE group is going back in December, so hopefully we will swim then! The cave is gorgeous, and I had a lot of fun exploring it. There were bats in the cave, which I thought was pretty exciting!

(This is where I gave up posting photos. It was taking AGES and I got bored. My apologies)

The next day, we took the kids to the beach! It was a lot of fun to go to the beach, and I never turn down a chance to swim in those warm Caribbean waves! There was a jetty that people were jumping off of into the ocean, so of course I had to get in on that. It was so much fun!! Unfortunately, after the beach we had to head back to Santiago and the real world. But it was a great weekend full of fun, games, and caves! I am so excited to go back in December!!!