My beloved readers!
An update on my life in Santo Domingo:
During the week, I’ve been working way too many hours which immediately explains why I haven’t been posting a lot lately.
But in the work-hard- play-hard philosophy, I’ve been having great weekends and some great week evenings as well.

Alcatel-Lucent was still looking an apartment for me, but, as usual, my moves are faster then the company’s, so I found myself a place. I’m living now with Will, a guy from NY in a very nice apartment in a good neighborhood. (You can see Will on the picture on the top, he's the one on the left) Where the Delta-hotel, even though also supposed to be a “safe” area, still had some extremely young hookers on the street, I have now the feeling I can walk around freely on my street and I feel really happy at my place, even though I don't spend too much time there.


Alejandro is one of the people who contacted me through couchsurf. He took me out once in Santo Domingo to a nice non-latin club which I really appreciated cause the meringue, salsa, bachata, regueton is coming out of my ears as we would say in Dutch.
Besides the fact we love the same music, another great thing about Alex, are his trip-organisation skills. His friends call it Ale-tours.
Two weekends ago I went with Ale-tours to Samana. Samana is a peninsula in the east of the island and also the name of one of the village we went to. We spent Saturday on an island. Ale-tours managed to get us a decent discount on the boat there as – and I quote- we were 7 Dominicans and only 2 foreigners. Well… just the way it works here. I’m already used to the fact that my white skin means paying more then Dominican people.
As usual, hiding myself for the picture :)
The village of Samana has 1 all-in hotel that even has an elevator to the beach!
Three bridges connect the mainland with 3 small islands. Adventurous as we are we took a look to find out where they lead to....
and well… doesn’t seem to very much actually.
The next day we went to Playa Rincon. Supposed to be number 7 in the top 10 beaches of the world, but I think many lists exist. Anyway, it’s number 1 in my personal ranking which in the end should the most important one, right? Ale-tours offered cool drinks, music and good company.

It was quite late when we got back to Santo Domingo because it was just too damn difficult leaving paradise to go back to the hectic city and my daily 9-to-9 job....