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Saturday morning four of us headed up to Santiago, the Dominican Republic’s second largest city at just over a half million people, to go to a baseball game Saturday night. We have to catch the Caribe Tours bus from Sosua, a city about fifteen minutes away by guagua. The buses leave for Santiago, a two-hour trip southwest, every hour on the 20. We get to the bus station at 10:22. Oh well.
According to the girls the bus was freezing. I thought it was a pretty comfortable temperature. The seats on these buses are amazing. They recline really far back and are wicked comfortable. I was asleep within a few minutes. The next thing I knew I was in Santiago. Derek, as a former peace corps volunteer, knows of a place that gives a discount to volunteers, including us. For 250 pesos each a night we each have a bed and a place to drop our stuff. The place is run by what I think are Canadians, but we never verified that. Either way they’re really nice. Like “we have a church group meeting thing that comes here tomorrow morning at ten, feel free to participate” nice.
We headed out to eat at a Cuban restaurant (despite the scolding anti-recommendation from the lady who runs the not-quite hostel place where we were staying) that Derek knew about and had been to. The place was really, really nice. It’s what I assume nice Cuban places in Cuba are like, if the U.S. government would let me go there. It looks a little bit like every Cuban place that is shown in any movie ever. I was thinking I should go to Cuba in December from here. Is U.S. immigration really going to go through my whole passport to verify where I have and haven’t been once I get home? Maybe that’s a risk I’m not willing to take.
Anyway, there’s a nice Cuban gentlemen who runs the place. He at first gives us the menus that have really expensive (and based on the food I ate, very good) food. We ask for the menu that is economico. Basically, we wanted the cheaper stuff. We all order rice and beans and the best chicken I’ve had thus far in this country. Meanwhile, the Cuban guy was busy occasionally dancing to anything from Queen’s “Radio Ga-ga” to a Flock of Seagulls. I immediately think of the movie Eurotrip when they accidentally arrive in Bratislava and a native constantly brings up 80s things like Miami Vice and “Where’s the beef?” I begin to wonder if Cuba is somehow the same way, and if this is new music to this nice gentleman. After all, us Americans have forced them to use cars from the 50s, maybe pre-Pepsi commercial burned Michael Jackson is just arriving on the shores of Havana.
We eat. The Cuban man shakes all of our hands and we all tell him how great his food is. I’ll be going back there. Next stop for now though? Centro Leon.
Centro Leon is a brand new museum created by some rich family/guy. It’s the nicest building I’ve seen in this country. There are a lot of paintings in there that are cool, a lot that are creepy, and a lot that are creepier. I won’t delve into it too much because while this museum wasn’t boring, me describing it would be.
After Centro Leon it was time for the main course of the weekend. Baseball! Aguilas v. Licey. Aguilas are the team from Santiago. Licey is a team from Santo Domingo that is formerly from Santiago. Anyway, big rivalry/insert Sox-Yankees comparison here etc. We get to Estadio Cibao and scalpers try to sell us tickets for 300 pesos. The face value is 200. We are suddenly struck by this ingenious idea, let’s go to the ticket office! We bought the cheapest tickets possible for 200 pesos. The gates open “sometime around 7” the caged-in ticket lady tells us. It was a little over two hours before game time…we had some time to kill. We found a bar/colmado-esque place on the road behind the outfield bleachers (this would be the equivalent to Lansdowne St.). Fortunately, public drinking is encouraged in this country. This place was like a snack bar at a little league field (open air window, pretty small), except it really only sold beer. So, we took the beer and little plastic cups and headed over to the plastic chairs made available across the street. That’s where we spent the next two hours, with a brief ATM run throw in the middle.
Shortly before 8, we headed back to the gates at the stadium. There wasn’t a heck of a lot going on outside for a big stadium that was having an event. The gates were still closed.
“Suspendido,” some random guy says. Postponed. What why? It’s partly cloudy at worst, what is going on? “Una vaina.” A thing. Three peoples responses were “una vaina.” So right now we’re going off the information that the game was postponed because of “a thing.” Next we find out “una vaina adentro.” Okay, that clears up everything, a thing inside. Finally someone says “los torres.” The only time I’d ever heard that word is when it applied to someone’s last name. It turns out it means tower. Two light towers along the third base line were out (what is this, the Cape League? I think to myself), so even though the lighting on the field was still pretty much exceptional, no game. Sounds about right.
The front gate to the stadium was open; we went in to use the bathrooms. I walked to the seating area to look at the field. Like I said, the lighting was still pretty good. We asked when the game will be made up. Doubleheader tomorrow (sweet we could do that), no it will be on Wednesday, no on Thursday. No one really knows is what it comes down to.
Well, the Sox are playing Tampa in Game 6, let’s go to a bar/restaurant and watch it. First though, the next step was to sell our tickets. We already knew where to go, after haggling a little bit over prices before the game. One youngish looking guy tells us to give the tickets to him for free so that he can bring his mom to the game. Charming. Except that we weren’t born yesterday and this is the same guy who tried selling us tickets before the game. The best was the kids around the stadium. The kids were basically our guide. “Don’t listen to him he’s lying” one says. The kids have no reason to lie. And here, as I’ll get to, they’re like little adults.
Another guy we talked to went running all over the place in traffic to talk to what we assume is his partner. They want the tickets for 50 pesos apiece. Our original goal was to cut our losses and take 100 for each, so we are definitely not going below that. They already knew we can’t go to the game. They think they have us compromised. Derek starts by offering to sell for 150, immediately followed by my “we have friends here that we’re just going to give these tickets to if we don’t get the price we’re looking for.” It works like Jim and Dwight’s sales pitches on the Office. Except there’s no “Dunder Mifflin, this is Pam/big paper company putting someone on hold” phone call mixed in. We sell for 100 each. That’ll buy us a few rounds.
It turns out the crazy man who was risking his life to go talk to his partner actually had no affiliation with the guy. He demands a “regalito” for “finding” the guy who buys our tickets from us. Yeah right. Again, with a few kids as our advisors, we just ignore him. A few “coños” and some random Spanish gibberish that wasn’t understandable later he’s gone. But we suddenly have about ten kids surrounding us now. These are the go-getters. They’re trying to figure out a way to earn money from us. The original kid (from here on out “the hey you! kid”) is the only one that is remotely helpful. He kept calling Derek “hey you” and explained where the best places to go to watch the game are. He also explained that using a carro publico (cheap transportation) will be hard because the routes are confusing. A few other kids argue with him. They’re like little four-foot adults. So a taxi is the only option. Once hey you kid gets confirmation from us, he goes sprinting to find a taxi. The other nine boys fan out too, showing little initiative. Finally, with the “help” of hey you kid, we find a taxi right in front of us. The rest of the group swarmed the car looking for a peso or two. All I needed was some flashbulbs going off and I was a bona fide celebrity.
When asked where we wanted to go, Jessica, who is black but is often thought to be Dominican, says “donde se quedan los gringos.” He brings us to the center of town. Ever restaurant has the game on. He drops us off at one across the street from the “Jarro Café,” which shamelessly has the same brown guitar symbol as the real restaurant (if you aren’t picking up on it, say jarro, but mostly concentrate on trying to roll your R. Still nothing? Add a W to the end. Oh P.S., J’s in Spanish are pronounced like an H).
This place looks like a nice establishment. Lots of different kinds of food. We found a table directly in front of a huge screen of the game. 1-1. Not bad for this version of Josh Beckett. We eat, drink, I call Varitek’s home run (this can be vouched for). As we left, I realized, that unlike Cabarete where a restaurant like this would be almost twice as much in price and its patrons would be mostly white people, there are no other white people here. Everyone was pretty dressed up (like night club dressed up, not black tie dressed up). But everyone here is Dominican. This is where the mid-upper class Dominicans go to eat and drink. Coming from where I’m living here and what I’m used to, this is my first exposure to that environment. There’s a Porsche in the parking lot, some Mercedes drive by.
We are across the street from the Monumento de Santiago which, if you Google it, looks pretty sweet at night. This is my first time in one of the two big Dominican cities, I think to myself. It’s a breath of fresh air.
