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“For most of this summer I painted houses in Providence, Rhode
Island, USA.  Sometimes I’d go to a show at the Safari Lounge but mostly I
worked.  After that I took a vacation to the Dominican Republic with my
girlfriend.  In typical ugly American fashion, I’d never been to a foreign
country (except Canada).  Also in typical ugly American fashion I’d never
bothered to learn a language other then English.  Luckily my girlfriend is from
the Dominican Republic and pretends to be real jet set and worldly and speaks
Spanish as her first language so she made up for my vulgar ignorance.  The
people seemed nice except one time we were in Santiago and some Haitian women
walked by and some guy selling coconut juice waved his hand in front of his nose
and said it smelled like Haitians.  I felt that was out of line but Haiti and
the DR have had a pretty terrible relationship going back centuries and anyway
most everyone else seemed nice enough.  Especially when I wore my Red Sox ball
cap and my Providence T-shirt, then all sorts of folks would come up to me to
talk about Ortiz, Ramirez, and Martinez.  Also, a lot of folks seemed to have
friends or relatives who live in Providence, which is home to 20,000 Dominicans. 
The only thing I really had a problem with was whenever I ordered shrimp
cocktail at a restaurant, instead of traditional cocktail sauce made of ketchup
and horseradish; they would douse the shrimp in a combination of ketchup and
mayonnaise which is essentially the same thing as McDonalds Special Sauce.  But
as far as vacation spots go, although the Dominican Republic might be a 3rd
world country, it’ll always be number 1 in my book. “