A Taste of Culture

I've had another great week. I've really been getting stuck into the Dominican culture with Cristian. He is such a legend. He's very happy to just hang out with me and help my Spanish and he's always looking for new things to teach me. On Tuesday I had some local food. We had 'kípe', which is sort of a sausage in breadcrumbs and was really tasty. Next I tried an 'empanada', which is similar to a Cornish pasty except it only has ham or cheese inside it. We went back to his room where he made me a 'batida' with a papaya fruit. This is basically a milkshake just, mad with ice and extra sugar. He's very keen for me to experience everything I can.

On Friday, he decided to make a cocktail for me. He used a 'sweet whisky' called Gitano Claro and a strawberry powder. I have to say that it was actually quite nice, the strawberry flavour numbing the strength of the alcohol. We also had a burger/hotdog which was just legendary. It had loads of onions in it as well, which as many people know are one of my current favourite pizza toppings. They work just as well in a burger.. 

Everyone asks me a lot of questions about my life, because it is totally different out here, so I thought I should pass on some of our culture. I've been teaching Cristian and his girlfriend about awkward situations. So far I've only taught them 'incómodo tortuga' (awkward turtle) and awkward balloon, but I'm sure we can move onto the whale eventually... 

I've also had a haircut, because everyone has very short hair here so I thought I should try it out. Unfortunately, there was a little misundertanding and it jut got trimmed instead of shaved. It was a bad job. My experiences at hairdressers always seem to produce poor results.. I've got to say, it looks pretty stupid. Cristian has practically no hair and yet he combs it, which amuses me. I wouldn't have thought that was necessary!

Another piece of good news is that I'm getting paid for working, on top of them paying for my accommodation. They're paying me 5000 pesos per fortnight, which is equivalent to about 96p an hour. It may not seem like much, but everything is a lot cheaper over here and I only really need to buy food.

One more thing: I found an article about Dominican slang which I thought perfectly sums up how I'm finding things and why communication is still an issue. Here's the link: http://dr1.com/articles/slang.shtml Check it out!