So it´s been a long while since the last update, but life without reasonable internet access is different for a quasi-city slicker.
As you may or may not know, Monte Cristi is very much the boonies, and few people seem to move to, or from this town. It is very settled. So being a newcomer looking for a place to stay for a longish period of time raises surprised eyebrows all over town. It took us several weeks to find anywhere close to reasonable for our needs, most of the places that were up for rent had been left to sit on their own, slowly deteriorating until they reached the point where you could not just move into them, you would have to fix them up. And frankly, we didn’t and don’t have the time for that. Besides, we were feeling too generous to kick all the spiders out of their habitats.
In the end it took us three weeks to find a place, and another week to get everything we needed to make the move. But it´s fantastic. We live on the second floor of a building that has a store below. It’s airy and has windows on all sides giving us a lovely breeze and views across the neighborhood. The neighborhood is cute and sits on a hill slightly south of the town center. It has a nice mix of people, spanning most classes and income brackets. Some of the biggest houses in town are up here, and some houses up here are not much more then sheds.
A dirt road runs through the neighborhood and along it you find mostly houses, but also a small colmado selling the essentials to life in the DR and a Banca (a Dominican lottery-stand). At night we are sometimes awakened by blaring motorcycles going down the road, and in the mornings, the roosters in our neighbor´s backyard wake us up around 5.30. We have two little terraces, one that faces the dirt road, and the other faces an open field with banana plants and grazing horses and birds in it. On the other side of the field is the main road from Monte Cristi out towards the Haitian border with all its varieties of traffic. It sounds nicer then it is maybe, the field also has piles of trash, a mini wetland and two unfinished gray concrete houses. Even so, it is pretty cute and the back terrace is a nice place to sit and chill. In all, it´s pretty fantastic to be in your own place after living out of a suitcase for so long.
At this time we are mostly settled in, but we still have some issues with the power. In the two and a half days we have been living here we have lost all power 6 times already. For hours at a time too. It´s pretty annoying. So we will hopefully install batteries and a huge inverter as a backup system in the coming days. It´s another expense, but absolutely necessary it seems unless you like sitting in the dark after 6.30.
So things are still not finished, there are still items missing, but we have a house, and it feels fantastic.