"Christmas in Santo Domingo" a Santo Domingo Travel Page by mikey_e

Now that I have gone through many of my pictures for European cities, and built numerous pages about dozens of locales, I felt it was time to revisit my Santo Domingo page and provide a much more fitting introduction to this wonderful city, the capital of the eastern half of Hispaniola. I visited Santo Domingo at the end of 2006 (December 23 to 30) with my sister, Joanna. We wanted to repeat our Caribbean adventure of two years earlier (see my Havana page for that trip) and were torn between Santo Domingo and San José, Costa Rica. Thanks to the University's mandatory Christmas holiday shut down, we had plenty of time to explore a holiday destination and wanted to make sure that, wherever we went, there would be plenty of things to do besides going to the beach and partaking of an open bar by the pool. Santo Domingo, with the first hospital in the Americas and its ample Spanish colonial architecture, seemed like the perfect choice, and we quickly bought our last minute tickets for the four hour flight from Toronto to the DR.

To be honest, we weren't very sure what to expect when we landed in the Dominican Republic. To start, the people we knew who had been there had gone to resorts, which either meant they were spirited from Santo Domingo airport to the hotel or they flew into Punta Cana on the north side of the island. Moreover, we were visiting during the Christmas season and, although the Lonely Planet guidebook had said that religion was a fairly low-key affair in the DR, Christmas is one of those times that it becomes important again. We weren't certain that things would be open, or that we would be able to do everything we had planned during our weeklong vacation. Luckily, apart from closures on the 25th, most things stayed open other days and we were able to pack in as many tourist sites, museums, nature trips and meals (oh, how the food was delicious!) as possible in our 7 days in the Caribbean.

Santo Domingo seemed to have it all, although our intensive itineraries meant that we had begun to run out of things to do in the city proper by the end of the trip. Nevertheless, the city appeased all of our interests, from the remains of the Spanish presence to the Museum of Modern Art and the Botanical Gardens that allowed us to enjoy Hispaniola's natural beauty in pristine conditions. The attitude of Dominicans was also very different from what we expected in a country that makes a large part of its GDP from tourism. Certainly, there were plenty of shoe shine boys and men trying to pressure us and particularly me to see casinos, strip clubs and brothels, but in general Dominicans were extremely helpful and rarely looked at foreigners as a means of easy cash. Fruit sellers, museum attendants, store clerks and the street vendors (who came to know me as the foreigner who loved empenadas) were all very friendly and loved to joke with us. Its such a shame that most tourists prefer to spend time at the resorts sunbathing with other foreigners rather than getting to know the warmth and character of this great island nation.