Tuesday, 24 February 2015

Sunday - the Student Version | Sarah

Sunday was the first day of “real life” at the base. Breakfast started at 7:00 and we were on the road by 7:45.  For the first Sunday Rachael led the way but we all needed to be paying attention as for the rest of the Sundays two people will be randomly assigned to get us to and from church. We walked for about 10 minutes to the bus stop where a bus (more like an over sized van) picked us all up. We squished all 27 of us in there by sitting beside locals, sitting on top of each other and standing. This was a bunch of fun as through out the ride we needed to make way so the locals could get off the bus.  It was quite a challenge for the people at the back of the bus. We had about a 15 minute bus ride and after we got off about a 20 minute walk to the Church.

Church was amazing. It was a huge Baptist church that had air condition, full music equipment, massive sound systems and a massive sanctuary. Singing in church was a lot of fun as many of us tried to sing in Spanish because singing in English became too difficult. We got to listen to the sermon by headset where a translator would speak the Spanish words to English. After about 2 hours of Church we made our way to the mall for Lunch and Internet.

The walk to the mall was about a half hour. The mall had many floors and many stores, some that where open and others that weren't. We all bought lunch and sat down and ate together. When we went to the internet cafe we realized it wasn't open so we spent about an hour at the mall trying to connect to the wifi, buying stuff from stores and just sitting and talking. Rachael had suspected this might happen so it wasn’t a big shock for me. Rachael had promised us internet time if we wanted it so the group got spilt into two around 2:30. Those that wanted internet could come to the Blue Mall with Rachael and Joey and the people who didn't were able to go back to base with Brian, Shelby, Shelby, and Kari.

I was among the people who wanted wifi so we made our way to the Blue Mall. This mall was crazy. Picture the Eaton Center in the middle of Santo Domingo. This mall had security guards that met us at the front doors as we entered, has restaurants on every level, had a hard rock cafe, and many high class stores. It also had a Marriot hotel attached to it. Some of our group of 12 had changed out of our church clothes which caused a lot of stares from security and from the people in the mall. Everybody was very well dressed, and looked very wealthy.The wifi started working right away but we needed to find an outlet for Alexa's iPod. So Alexa, Billy and I found one by an elevator and decided to take a seat for a bit. We were approached by a security guard about 5 minutes later who said we weren’t allowed to be sitting anywhere in the mall. We listened, got up and found the rest of the group who was apparently having the same sorts of problems. So we walked around slowly for 10 minutes staring at our IPod's trying to talk to people back home. When we found a food court on the top floor we took a seat in the corner and tried to avoid security. This was difficult as two of them were standing at the entrance of the food court casually staring at us. We stayed and connected with people for another 20 minutes.

We left at about 3:30 and made our way back to the bus stop. All 12 of us made it onto a bus with only 3 other locals which made it a lot less crowded than the morning. We piled in and were on our way. This ride took longer as our bus stopped at every stop and the driver tried to get people to hop in. This gave street vendors the opportunity to come to our windows and try to sell us things. People were selling crackers, peanuts, pop, water, and our favourite, Skim Ice (a type of freeze in DR). Rach gave us money so we could buy freezes. Makayla and Hannah were the first to buy one from the window. They gave the money and as the man was cutting open the freeze the bus started driving away with the man chasing it. Thankfully the bus stopped after 5 meters and we were able to get our freezes. We shared 4 among all of us in the hot bus.

We got off the bus at our stop and walked about 10 minutes before we reached this really fun wall. It was on the side of the road and slanted so you could climb it and was about 20 feet high.  Makayla, Hannah and I decided to climb the wall and walk as far as we could above everybody else. This was very scary as the ledge was about 8 inches wide and to fall would have hurt a lot.



We were about 15 minutes away from the base when the rain started. It started slowly but soon was coming down full force. We came back to the base drenched! We were wet but we had had a lot of fun that day.

Sunday had been something I was looking forward to for a long time and it totally exceeded my expectation. Getting to Church on public transit was an absolute blast, singing and listening to church I loved and the mall was definitely an adventure. All around, Sunday was an awesome day and I look forward to many more adventures in the future.

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