When I arrived in the Dominican Republic, my family entered into a very small airport surrounded by grassy land, palm trees, and herds of animals. As we walked off of the plane and into the airport I had a feeling that it was going to be an excellent trip. Things started out pretty bumpy but they got better as the trip went on. It was hard to communicate with almost everyone. We found this out because we were all starving when we got off of the plane, we found the closest restaurant and when we read the menu it was not in English and none of the employees spoke any English either. We walked around the airport to get to where our luggage was and the more people I heard speak the further away I felt from home because I could not understand a single word they were saying. This gave us a hard time on the trip but we could manage well enough. We were able to rent a small white car after a long wait and much confusion and we were off to our home for the week. The car was a little cramped but it was just big enough to fit the five of us into it and our luggage. It took us hours to get to the region of where we were going to stay and about an hour and a half to find where the house was. We were wandering around in the dark, in a foreign country that had cracked and bumpy roads trying to ask people how to get where we were headed, but the people we did ask didn’t speak any English.

On our adventure to find our house we asked a man for directions and when he turned around he ended up having a machine gun strapped across his chest. I was not sure if he was part of the police force or a civilian so I was more terrified than ever when I saw him and tried ducking my head so that he wouldn’t kill me if he sprayed our car with his bullets of doom. This man, like all the other people, only spoke Spanish so the only way he helped was by making us wonder if it was a bad decision to come on this trip. When we reached our house after our exhilarating search, I was more relieved than ever. My grandparents, cousins, aunt, and uncle were already there and had been for a day. They all looked happy and cheerful so we started to think that this vacation would turn out well afterall.

That night I tried getting a good sleep because I knew that on the next day I would be doing amazing things like hiking, playing on the beach, and going out to restaurants for our meals. As soon as I laid down, a mosquito flew in and bit me. In the house there were no windows, only shutters, even the door was a slide open shutter door. The weather was also scorching hot all day long which made it hard to sleep, I was tossing and turning all night and almost fell off the couch I was sleeping on multiple times, I did not feel very safe that night either but I managed to fall asleep by thinking that I was in my own bed, safe and comfortable.

When I woke up that next morning I wanted to get a drink of water, but right before I could get one my Uncle John warned me that the tap water was unclean and could make you sick if you drank any. Unlike the tap water here their water had not been cleaned and had all sorts of bad things in it. I guess my cousin forgot the memo because she ended up getting sick from it later in the trip.

Our house was right next to the beach which was amazing with hardly anyone there and 7 to 10 foot waves. There were small shops along the edge of the beach and lots of cool hiking trails circling around the island. I was beginning to love where I was and I never wanted to leave. I only had second thoughts when I was in the water with my brother and cousins playing around, one of the many stray dogs that were there came into the water and started swimming towards me. I got scared at first because I didn't know what it was going to do. I tried avoiding it, but it followed me around everywhere and would never look away. We ended up bringing it home with us and we called it Perro which is dog in Spanish. Perro stayed with us for the rest of the week and we fed him our leftover food scraps which he enjoyed.

That whole week I survived on Danimals, rice, and pasta. Our second to last night there was thanksgiving, but instead of having turkey with mashed potatoes and stuffing and greatness, we had two chickens for the eleven of us with a small amount of mashed potatoes and little gravy. That day may not have been like any other Thanksgiving I had experienced before, but it was still one of the greatest, and my whole family agreed. We were all smiling and even Perro liked it because he would eat the bones of our finished chicken. We spent the last night on the point of the beach having a picnic, gazing at the sunset, and snorkeling in water where you could barely see one foot in front of you.

It was sad to leave our great home, the beach, Perro, all those great memories, and all the confusing conversations. Just kidding, I'm very glad to have left that. I will never forget my time in the Dominican Republic, and I hope to go back again.