My mom was from there, and I guess I feel obliged to say something about it. I've been there many times.
DR is another one of those places where it's warm and pretty enough to draw tourists from other places in the world where it's not so warm and not so pretty.
At the extremes, the poverty there is quite severe. There are easily hundreds of thousands of people in the country who live in homes they have constructed from materials they have collected over time, with dirt floors and no electricity or plumbing. If you venture into the interior, where very few tourists have any reason or inclination to go -- unless they are "seeking" for something -- you will see scenes like this:
http://www.peacegallery.org/images/c...er/dr/dr06.jpg http://www.peacegallery.org/images/c...er/dr/dr12.jpg http://www.peacegallery.org/images/c...er/dr/dr11.jpg http://www.peacegallery.org/images/c...er/dr/dr20.jpg http://www.peacegallery.org/images/c...er/dr/dr21.jpg
I can't imagine that anyone in the world with a computer, much less an adult Webmaster will, will so much as see scenes like this fio they were to visit. These are the noble poor, who live lives of extraordinary physical hardship, punctuated wherever and whenever opportunity permits by excruciatingly brief (but soul-deep) moments of unequivocal joy. If anyone reading this plans a visit, I would say stick to the resort grounds and your nightly banquets of snapper and shrimp -- I don't say avoid the poor for your sake, but for theirs. They are very perceptive and instinctive, and you will njot be ale to conceal the discomfort, disgust and shock at the conditions in which they live. It hurts their feelings, but, still, they will concern themselves more for you than for themselves.
In the city, there is also terrible poverty but a different sort -- this will seem more recognizable to those of you who have traveled to any of a number of places around the world, like Phuket and Sao Paolo where the many complex layers, wheels and levers of a Big City are gritted over and "gummed" up with the smashed flesh of people so poor they can't get out of the way of the metaphorical "machinery" even when they see it coming.
Of course, the Big Cities (Santo Domingo, in the case of the Dominican Republic) also bring haves and ultra-have-nots into close proximity. I'd say this is going to be very terrible for your average JCrew wearing "Delicate Person" from the US. In Santo Domingo, like the other two cities I mentioned above, youthful beauty and the innocence that usually remain attached to it at least through late adoloscence have been destroyed in these children. You will see them leaning on lamposts or idling in hotel lobbies with an expression on their faces that will tell you they don't know why they are their or what they are waiting for. On the advice of an older version of themselves, they have exposed a malnourished midriff or a thigh brown thigh no thicker than a baseball bat, because they at least have been made to sense what parts of their bodies will bring over a customer from Europe or the US. If the older mentor has been kind, they will not have told them too much about what happens up in the rooms or in the backseats of cabs that do nothing more than drive around the block until the patron has gratified himself.
You will look at these White Men, and they will seem almost recognizable to you from your own American or Canadian cities. You will see them later in the Airport, and you will wonder how they go back to "civilization" with the spiritual blood and guts of children under their fingernails.
[changing subject...]
One of the most beautiful beaches I have ever seen is Boca Chica -- though it is not so beautiful there now as it was when I was child with my mother. But the beach's most exceptional attribute is always there. Owing to the arrangement of sand banks and mangroves and reefs there are never any waves -- it's glass flat and you can walk out for hundreds odf yards in the direction of the horizon without the depth of the water climbing above your hips. As a child, this made it possible for me to enjoy the Sea as I never had in New York or anywhere else. An aspect of my strengh must have developed on that beach, and I always think of my moments alone, feeling utterly safe in the embrace of salt air and motionless crystal clear water. But that was just my trip, along time ago -- :)
2HP