Trip to the dominican part 2

Our Bus to Sosua

Our Cute Hotel: Hotel Tropix

Coconut Tree ( we were enamored with all the fruit trees)

More of our hotel

Mango Tree

One of the funny named gift shop

Walking down the road in Sosua

Our Beach Chairs

Beautiful Beach

Guy with a gun and Mariners T-shirt

Our favorite Bank security guard with  huge gun

Entrance to our hotel

So first off lets talk about Dominican spanish. My spanish has gotten a little rusty over the past few years I will admit but for the most part I can understand when Spanish is spoken around me. This is not the case with Dominican spanish. Dominican's leave out the "S" and a few more letters so that a sentence sounds like one really long word. Randy kept asking me, "What are they saying?" and I kept having to answer, "I have no idea." I thought I was going crazy until I started talking to other people from the states that whole heartedly agreed with me that the spanish in the Dominican is very difficult to understand. That was quite the relief for my pride. Now on to our trip to Sosua. Sosua is a small beach town on the northern coast of the Dominican Republic. We took a bus ride out there, that seemed to never end. We finally arrived and were met by the motoconches (motorcycle taxis). Randy and I had already discussed that we were going to take one to the area around our hotel. As I stepped off the bus I was immediately greeted by several men pulling my backpack in different directions trying to get me to get on their motorcycle. Thankfully I had Randy there and I was able to communicate with them where we wanted to go. The arranged price was 50 pesos each (1.25). Our hotel was a small hotel and the manager of the hotel had already told me that most motorcycle drivers were not going to know where it was but he had told me that it was near the "Playera Supermercado" and then had given me directions from there. So our motorcycle taxis drove us down the hill to the "Playera Supermercado". I thought I was going to fall off and die the entire time but Randy thought it was fun. It was completely dark by the time that we arrived in Sosua and when we got off the taxi I did not see anything that represented the directions that our hotel had given us. Randy and I started walking to get our bearings. Our taxi drivers were still swarming us asking if we needed another ride because they could tell that we were a little lost. They kept telling us they could take us where we needed to go. Finally, one told me that there was another playera supermercado closer to the beach. So we figured we were at the wrong one and they said that they would take us. So we hop back on the bikes and they take us to the other playera supermercado which was a much shorter ride than the first one and then they tell us it is going to cost 100 pesos each. We precede to have an argument with our taxi driver telling him that there is no way we are forking over another 100 pesos each. Which was really Randy telling them no way and me translating back and forth. Translating an argument over money is not my favorite thing to do by the way. After they guy finally got the clue that we were only given them another 50 pesos each we continued trying to find our hotel. No one knew where it was and we were still very lost. We decided just to walk and hope that eventually we would find it, we knew it was up a hill somewhere. So we walked about 100 ft and what do we find, the first playera supermercado. So basically our motorcycle drivers took us around the block the long way and then wanted to charge us 2.50 each. Randy was a little frustrated to say the least. Anyways, after this point and no more mortorcyclists harssing us we were able to find our hotel. Now I wish I could say our adventure for the day ended here... By the time we got to our hotel it was about 8:30 and we were starving. Unfortunately, the hotel manager wasn't in that night so all we had was a letter from him with our key. We asked one of the other people staying at the hotel what was good and she told us that basically anything was good. So we set off down the road to find food. We got to the main street with the restaurants, took a right, and settled into the first one we saw ( like I said we were really really hungry). We ordered our food and drinks and then began to take in the surroundings. There were a lot of fat, old, men at the bar and we noticed that next to each one of them was a young, 20ish, pretty dominican girl sitting next to them in pretty skimpy clothes. That's when it hit us that we were in a restaurant filled with hookers! We finished up pretty quickly and decided to call it a night. We learned later that if we had turned left instead of right we would of had a much better time finding a decent restaurant. But that first night we were exposed to a huge problem in the beach towns of the Dominican, referred to as sex tourism. Men come down for the express purpose of hooking up with these girls. Thankfully our hotel doesn't allow it to go on in their hotel so that was a blessing. However, the poor hotel we stayed in (that was a fantastic hotel) is barely making it because they have taken a stand against it. The manager, a super nice guy named Carl, said they would be full every night if they allowed it. Our heart was very burdened as we saw these girls and I am not sure what the Lord has in store for us in this arena but it is a huge area of need that we saw in the Dominican. The rest of our trip was pretty uneventful, a lot of laying on the beach and swimming on the ocean. It was so relaxing and Randy and I so enjoyed being together, it was a little second honeymoon and I am so thankful for the time we had. --