Santo Domingo

Unfortunately I have misplaced my journal so I won't be posting it today.  Hopefully I can find it tomorrow and share my thoughts as i recorded them at the time.  Nevertheless I am going to continue with my impressions of Santo Domingo.

First a shot of a storefront taken from the bus which transported us from the airport to the house we spent the night.  I have no idea what they are selling, I don't speak spanish.

A few men standing in front of an auto dealer.  The cars look relatively nice, the roads in the city were well paved and maintained, and, in a contrast to Haiti, they had stoplights.  Traffic was heavy in certain areas but for the most part orderly and well organized.

Here we see a Dominican ambulance parked outside what appears to be a small medical center.  Unfortunately I didn't get a chance to stop and investigate, so I am unable to make any comparisons between The Dominican's state of healthcare and Haiti's.  However I would venture a guess that it follows the same pattern as everything else.  When I get into my time in Haiti I will have a very telling picture of the first ambulance I saw.

While the state of infrastructure and traffic in Santo Domingo was mostly very good, not everything was perfect.  This is another bus owned by the same company as the one we were traveling in.  We happened to drive past in on the outskirts of the city.  It was very surreal to see a bus that was almost a perfect replica of ours (we had orange curtains) wrecked on the other side of the road.  Amazingly the driver seemed to be fine despite the horrific looking damage to the area he was sitting in.  That's him in the blue.  Only a small bandage and still able to walk.  Very lucky!

Tomorrow I will begin the trip to the border and across into Haiti.  The transitions from Santo Domingo to rural Dominican Republic and then to Haiti were shocking in both the acuteness of the difference and the abruptness of the changes.