Hi,
Like I’ve said, our home here in Las Galeras is magnificent but, as they say, that’s all about location.
While our house is comfortable, it’s a far cry from elegant (and your bungalow isn’t even within earshot of elegance–but more about that when you express an interest in actually visiting…)
If you’ve been reading these missives for awhile, you know that Denise took the month of February off to attend to matters in the “Other Washington” and that I’ve seized the chance to do some heavy lifting around here in the deferred maintenance department. As a consequence this place is trashed. And it’s been trashed for, well, it’s beginning to seem like forever.
There’s no two ways about it: Denise left town and I turned our idyllic little home into a construction site.
All of the cupboards and shelves were removed weeks ago and their former contents neatly arranged in logical piles covering every horizontal surface in the living room while I sought (in vain, as it turns out) for a single stain color to unify the wide variety of woods and finishes used in building this place. It really looks arbitrary: door casings one color, window trim another, that sort of thing. I can just imagine the carpenter selecting material based on what was in stock on any given day. I have no idea what the painter was thinking.
The furniture and cabinets built around Las Galeras is only a slight improvement over the concrete blocks and planks and orange crates last seen in graduate school. In fact, some of my better orange crates could easily pass muster for the trim here, given a coat of earth-colored varnish.
Interestingly enough, your more competent furniture mechanics smooth the surface of their work with a side grinder and sanding disk before applying one finish coat of a varnish-and-paint mixture. The gouges and swirls add texture and create a nice effect.
I quickly realized that, short of opaque paint, color was not the way to tie this polyglot together. So I decided to appeal to the sense of touch and perhaps strike something close to a uniform sheen. Accordingly, I hied off to the ferreteria and bought some sandpaper (a LOT of sandpaper.)
It was not easy, but I managed to track down a half-sheet finish sander of unknown manufacture. In the process I actually began to understand the attraction of the dominican approach to wood finishing. I relaxed my standards somewhat just about the time I went into my 15th ferreteria looking hopelessly for a palm sander.
Fully equipped, I spent DAYS going after the badly-finished and unfinished lumber and our splintery cabinetry with a vengeance. I raised huge clouds of dust which would have settled evenly on the logical piles, except that I’ve been constantly rummaging through them in search of one thing or another.
Recently the dust is swirling through the living room, forming little eddies and washing up against the piles of kitchen utensils and linen. It’s even beginning to settle into miniature dunes in the lee of some of the more tumbledown heaps.
Sweeping helps a little, but at some point you’ve just gotta stop generating dust.
Which is why I’m glad that Denise will be back soon. It’s time to call this little project good and pull things back together, maybe wash up and put everything away.
This stuff may not be made from orange crates but it sure ain’t no piano either.
Regardless, I imagine that Denise will be pleased. I’m certain that even if she is not she will say the right thing when she sees this.
That makes me a lucky man.
Bill
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Tags: Denise Hanna, Dominican Republic, Las Galeras, Living in the Dominican Republic, Retire, Retirement, Samana
Hi,
I had dinner the other evening with 17 Frenchmen and a pig. The meal was a festive affair and an experience to be savored over time. (It was a fairly large pig.)
The soiree was occasioned by a number of regular French visitors to Las Galeras who were slated to return to Marseilles. Fafa (Francoise) had organized a farewell pig roast to give them something to remember until their return.
Somehow or other I was invited, the only non-French participant except for the pig. I’m not sure how I made the cut–it’s certainly not my mastery of the French language, or most things French for that matter. Although, as it happens, I DO enjoy a good cheese and am very respectful of bread. But that’s about as far as it goes.
Fafa HAD seen me make a couple of pretty good jokes, none of which were in English, and so maybe guessed that I could hold my own with his crowd.
To help prepare for the challenge of being the only non-French speaking person there, a French friend in DC prepared some helpful phrases for me: “Good evening,” “How much does the pig weigh?” and “May I have a cup of coffee, please?”
I was also prepared for deeper stuff and so was able to discuss details of my recent activities: “I am painting our kitchen,” and “I washed the walls with the garden hose.” My companions were very thoughtful when given this news, perhaps attributing my preparation method to the superior techniques employed by a true professional. I think that they talked the strategy over among themselves later.
I did elect to not use one particularly charming topic that she had prepared for me, the rather impolitic, but unfortunately quite true: “I have a frog living in my toilet bowl.”
Given the prevailing demographic that evening, I elected to save the story of the grenouille for another time, perhaps for a different audience altogether.
The food was simple and wonderful. I would describe the conversation as energetic. These people have got to be conveying 4/5ths of what they mean with tone, inflection and facial expression, not to mention wild gestures and some serious body English applied to what I can only assume was the occasional well-turned phrase.
To a person, these folks had the most animated faces I’ve been around in many years. It was like a wonderful movie to just watch the exchanges play across their faces.
Since I can inflect and gesture we got along just fine, although the nuances of some of the conversation was admittedly over my head. Things like subjects and verbs, for example.
When all else failed I tried to look thoughtful, or fell back on the 3 most useful phrases in any language: “Please;” Thank-you;” and the companion to those 2: “Pardon me, will you speak more slowly?”
And then, after the postre’, we began to sing.
Like it was the most natural thing in the world. And I’m not talking lyrical or even melodic songs. We were all about rollicking, table thumping hootin’ and hollerin’ barrel house boogie, which I can also do.
A heretofore pretty quiet guy who looks remarkably like Mr. Magoo emerged as the chief instigator and de facto band leader. This fellow fully opened his eyes only when his face split in an ear-to-ear grin, which he did frequently in his role as maestro.
I droned along loudly as best I could, emphasizing the refrains if not the tunes, and kept pretty good time on the table. When I began to hit a syncopated beat I knew that I would be invited back.
That I could remember the words to Fre’re Jacques cemented the deal.
All of which has made me think about communication and language and the creation and conveyance of meaning and the nature of human cohesion and persuasion, again.
Bill
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Tags: Dominican Republic, French, Las Galeras, Living in the Dominican Republic, Retire, Retirement, Samana
Hi,
Previously I told some of you about certain aspects of our garden. For example, I’m pretty sure that I mentioned the ubiquitous green and purple plant that is succulent and juicy enough to be useful in extinguishing a fire–a fire of brush and garden debris, for example.
Junior (ah, remember Junior?) and I spent the better part of a week building a monster pile of this stuff and I’m only now getting it to smolder away. That was 3 or 4 weeks ago, and the garden is overgrown again, but this time it’s in bloom. Salmon and red and purple and yellow and orange and more reds: the blossoms are phenomenal. The lavender orchid growing in the crotch of a tree beside the wooden walk winding down the hill has been in bloom for more than a month that I know of.
And even though this property is fairly small (a little less that 1,000 sq. meters) there is a panoply of plants that I’ve yet to fully comprehend. That innocent-looking but savage little holly-like leaf that raised a blistering welt, for one.
But my favorite was taking a break from painting the other day and looking up and seeing: Bananas.
Mind you, this is a big plant and the hand of bananas is itself quite large. And it’s 30 feet from our front door. And it was a surprise. Just when I was believing that I had it all mapped out, I stumble on a banana tree peering from beside the A-frame guest bungalow.
It’s better bananas than another bed of the devil holly plant, that’s for sure.
When I lived in Portland and again in Seattle I planted apple trees on our property, and we always enjoyed the fruit. Never in my wildest imaginings did I suspect that at some point we’d have bananas growing in the yard. But there you have it.
Life and gardening sure take some interesting turns.
I’ll keep you posted.
Bill
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Tags: Dominican Republic, Las Galeras, Living in the Dominican Republic, Retire, Retirement, Samana
Hi,
We are quite pleased with our semi-automatic washing machine.
It’s pretty much just what it sounds like. It performs a few onerous tasks, such as tumbling the clothes or, spinning out the excess water, but it requires human intervention at each step in the process.
Here in Las Galeras we’re pretty water-conscious and so that human touch is even preferable to the super-duper automatic front-loader that I’ve used for over a decade in Washington. It gives one the opportunity to assess the condition of the water and make an informed judgment about further use based on relative turbidity, among other things.
We treat water very differently here on our little hill in the Caribbean.
The dowser predicts that water is 47 meters below the surface of our property, and is pretty safe in that prediction because the big well-drilling rig can’t make it up the road to our place. So we’ll never know if 47 meters really means 45 or 47.3. I do love the specific measure though, tied as it is to a hunch and a feeling. I suppose that we’ve all seen “by guess and by golly” presented as gospel before.
There IS something vaguely familiar about a guy delivering the deadpan verdict while brandishing the tool of his trade, in this case a stick.
So we collect rainwater in a cistern. Some months a lot and others not so much.
This provides the basis for Barnaby’s water-hauling business. I can see his truck on the farm below, and know that he can deliver a tank of water for 900 pesos if you are Dominican, 1,000 pesos otherwise. I don’t claim Dominican status yet, but am working on it.
Those of you who have endured these little notes since late November will recall something of my troubles with the failed roof coating on our concrete roof, which is inexplicably flat. A flat roof in this climate makes no more sense than one in the maritime northwest in the United States. And we’ve now owned one of each, eyes wide open.
Anyway, the old roof is off and the new is on and we’re ready for that rain. Maybe the dowser guy has a special stick for calculating up, I dunno.
We’re in a “still water” culture now, rather than the “running water” culture in the US. So we pay attention to how we use water. The least-dirty laundry goes in first and the rinse water from one load becomes the wash for the next. And everything finishes up in the garden.
Try that with your automatic Maytag.
Bill
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Tags: Dominican Republic, Las Galeras, Living in the Dominican Republic, Retire, Retirement, Samana
Hi,
A couple of years ago I was privileged to administer the IT department for our union and I learned a lot of things during that grand adventure. Because I had a skilled and knowledgeable staff I did not have to learn a lot of stuff, too.
One of the things I never had to master is a full understanding of the numerous algorithms that various Internet Service Providers use to distinguish legitimate e-mail from mass-mailed Spam that is targeting their customers.
I now suspect that some of my correspondents may receive e-mail from our “elotrowa” domain only when it is individually addressed, as is this message. Others seem to have no problem getting mail that I send to a group.
If you got an e-mail from me in the last couple of days with a subject line that said something like “No Fat In The Food,” then we’ve got no problem, and you can disregard the rest of this message.
If you DIDN’T get an e-mail with that subject, then your ISP has perhaps identified my e-mails as Spam, maybe because they’re addressed to enough people to trigger a blocking algorithm, I dunno.
Anyway, if you did not get that e-mail (and if you care) you might should contact your ISP and ask them to place anything originating from the domain “elotrowa.com” on what is called a “white list.” That should ensure that any e-mail from here sent to one of our groups that originates with “banderson@elotrowa.com” or “dhanna@elotrowa.com” makes it through OK.
Verizon, for example, seems to block “elotrowa.com” for at least some folks.
The “Fat in the Food” isn’t one of the best we’ve sent (that might be the frog in the toilet, which is still circulating in cyberspace) but I’ll paste it below for those who may have missed it.
Hope all’s well with you.
Bill
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No Fat in the Food
Hi,
We’ve noticed something about Dominican cuisine. There doesn’t seem to be any fat in the food.
And, since I’m American, I LIKE the way fat tastes. But, we’re adjusting. And I’m learning to enjoy eating in this way.
It’s taken awhile to figure out what’s to like about Dominican cooking, not that I’ve mastered the oeuvre. I have not. But I can get by in Spanish in a simple Dominican restaurant and I’m not starving in my own kitchen, even though Denise is back in DC for the month of February.
As it is at the moment, if it came out of our kitchen I made it. That’s a radical and not particularly welcome departure from our pattern of the last 20 years(overlooking 6 months of fast food while on the campaign trail in 1996.)
Some Dominican dishes are sort of non-descript, more like really efficient fuel than something one would eat for pleasure. Other foods that appear deceptively simple are a whole different world of flavor once you dig in.
Mostly the food isn’t heavily spiced and the spices available–at least those that I’ve found, aren’t very potent. I don’t think I’ll lose my appetite for spicy food, but I’ve certainly put it away for a while.
But, hey, let’s admit it: there’s a lot to be said for letting a chicken walk around and eat bugs and scraps and whatnot, and it’s not a bad thing to know the fisherman or the farmer. All of those things are unavoidable in Las Galeras, where commercial refrigeration is absent and prepared portions are unheard of.
However, the very best fried chicken I’ve ever eaten can be had in a little hole in the wall on the main drag in the town of Samana. They roll up the metal door and there you are in the dining room, 6 feet from the pop, whine and backfire of the ubiquitous motoconchos and the unrelenting honk of horns and the belching of truly impressive clouds of sooty diesel exhaust. But the fried chicken is absolutely perfect.
We’re the only gringos in the place, and I’m generally one of a few men without the obvious butt of a semi-automatic sticking out of my wasteband. It seems to be where the local businessmen go for lunch.
Did I mention that the fried chicken is outrageously good? It’s cheap, too, which is something that cannot generally be said for restaurant fare in the RD.
There’s not much sugar in the food, either, although I compensate pretty heavily with unrefined sugar in my pretty stout coffee.
We’ve both lost a fair amount of weight without really trying. I feel better than I have in years.
Bill
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Tags: Dominican Republic, Labor Union, Las Galeras, Living in the Dominican Republic, Retire, Retirement, Samana