Our Days Without Power

I will never again take for granted the ability to flip a light switch and fill a room with light!  We spent about three days in our apartment without power last week.  It felt much longer than that!  I think the toughest thing was dealing with mealtime.  We had to throw out a lot of the food in our fridge.  Aunt Lori and I walked to the grocery store before almost every meal and tried to buy just enough food for that meal.   They have a gas stove so we were able to use the stovetop but when we did cook we had to either eat everything or throw food away because we had nowhere to store leftovers.  I spent one day waiting for the plumber (who never came) while Aunt Lori went to the electric company to settle things (unsuccessfully).  That morning I labeled a lot of the items in the apartment with their Spanish names on post-it notes to help the family with their vocabulary.
One of our days without power Aunt Lori and I walked to the Plaza de la Cultura.  A plaza here in the city that is surrounded by museums.  We went to the modern art museum first.  I have always had mixed feelings about modern art.  Some pieces are beautiful and inspiring and others I just look at and think, "I don't get it" or "I could do that."  Aunt Lori and I had fun walking through.  Of course, all the plaques describing the paintings were in Spanish and our vocabulary is limited.  So we started "translating" the plaques and naming some of the painting ourselves.
Next we went to The Museum of the Dominican Man.  Speaking of the Dominican Man...the catcalling here is out of control!  It is constant!  So as we walked into the museum Aunt Lori said, "Oh good, maybe this will help us understand why they have to do that all the time!"  It didn't.  The museum exhibit is about the Taino people, the native people of the Dominican Republic.  When we walked in we thought it was closed at first because it was dark.  We asked the woman at the front desk, who clearly hated her job, and she said it was open.  So we bought our tickets and she gave us headsets which thankfully had an English option.  She pointed us toward the first room so we walked in and started our tour.  After we finished that room it was very unclear as to where we were supposed to go next.  We started walking back out into the lobby thinking that might connect us to the next room.  The front desk lady pointed us toward a very scary elevator.  The look of it and the noises it was making left us praying that we wouldn't plummet to our death.  We got in with no instructions as to which floor to go to so we took a guess and pressed 2.  When the doors opened we peaked onto the second floor and had obviously stubbled into some kind of meeting going on in the room.  So we closed the doors and tried 3.  Bingo!  We walked through the rest of the exhibit...which was really interesting at first and then turned out to be room after room of artifacts that all look the same.  So to sum up...we found The Museum of the Dominican Museum to be confusing and hard to understand (appropriate maybe?  given our struggles with the language barrier).
So that pretty much sums up our days without power here at the apartment.  Every time we came home from somewhere we would hold our breaths and flip a light switch hoping that it was turned back on.  While we were without power we were also without our long distance phone and without internet (so we had no way to contact our families back at home).  By the time the weekend hit we were all going a little crazy.  So we packed up and went to the beach for the weekend!  Blog post to come...

Cheers!