people, cars and dirt - Santo Domingo

Since Nina‘s passport had been stolen a couple of weeks ago when she had been mugged in the capital, she needed a new one in order to fly out of the country. She already had to postpone her flight to a week later, but finally on tuesday they gave her an emergency appointment at the dutch embassy in Santo Domingo to get a provisional travel document.
I knew how dangerous Santo Domingo was for a girl on her own, so I offered her to accompany her to the capital. We hat to take the bus leaving las Terrenas at 5am in the morning. When we arrived in Santo, we still had 2 and a half hours to kill, so we went to the ciudad colonial by uber and ate breakfast in a café where everything is 100% glutenfree and based on coffee. I was delighted! I had a really tasty Chai latte, an espresso and delicious oat pancakes with fruit and honey. I still dream of them now. Afterwards we headed to the embassy where in total we had to wait for 2 hours. In between we left the building once to go and take colour- pictures of Nina for her Passport, because she had only brought black and white ones. At the studio we asked the owner to take some pictures of us together and even though it was meant as a joke at first, we ended up having a fotoshoot.
During our wait we played all possible games and we laughed a LOT. Even the security guards had fun watching us.. we caught them laughing:)
When we finally had the new passport we checked out two malls, of which one is the famous Àgora Mall, but it had nothing special really. So we decided to get the 3pm bus back to Las Terrenas. As we got to the bus station, which is located in one of the worst parts of the city, almost a ghetto, we noticed we didnt have enough money to pay for the busride. We searched online for „cajeros“, atm‘s, close to us and found one in 5 mins walking distance. We started walking and soon understood that it had been a bad, really bad idea. The pathway along the road we were walking on got tighter and tighter, the cars to our sides were rushing past crazy fast, people were staring at us, talking to us, trying to reach out for us. I had my phone in my hand for the google maps, some guys screamed and shouted at me to put my phone away because otherwise somebody would rip it off me. There were people lying on the street, people walking past us, trash everywhere and a really bad smell. We got to a crossing where the sidewalk was very narrow, we had to cross the street but the cars didnt seem to ever stop. Suddenly a guy came up to us and asked us what we were doing here and told us that it was very dangerous. With tears in my eyes I told him we needed money and thank god he lead us to an atm. We got the money and walked back as fast as we could, got on the bus and drove home. I felt really bad afterwards. Reality had really hit me and i had a lot to think about. At night I went to salsa class to distract me and it worked. Later on I went for a dance at Babylon with Mickah. All in all, interesting day.Read more