Day 2 – Punta Cana – Wave Me Away

Woke up on Monday morning and headed to the buffet for breakfast. They had quite the spread…everything you ever need; fruit, pancakes, toast, eggs, bacon, etc. Very Canadian with some exotic stuff strewn about. I headed to the main man cooking up some omelettes and watched him work away at the beautiful concoction. I also noted that I would stay away from the omelette for the rest of my trip. This trip wasn’t about gorging myself in food and excess like the followers of Dionysus. I wanted to just remain normal in eating and whatnot. This is mainly fueled by the fact that I’m heading to the doctor’s office in a few weeks to check out my cholesterol. 😉

I spent the morning waiting for Vero to fix things up with her grandmother’s room. We also had another group booking excursions off the resort as well as booking a-la-carte meals. There are a half dozen restaurants on the resort which gave a-la-carte options instead of the buffet and you had the opportunity to book three of them. The trick is that you need to book them IMMEDIATELY upon arriving because they book up fast. We managed to book the Mexican, Italian and BBQ restaurants so all was good. However, all said and done, all these events took the entire morning to complete. Vero’s grandmother finally got a room and received $150USD in compensation, a t-shirt, a bottle of rum and an all-access pass to the resort which also included the spa. Not too shabby. After settling her into her room we had lunch and went to the market on the resort which consisted of little booths around a courtyard where the merchants asked you to see their merchandise. One merchant gave us some necklaces for free (which Vero gave him $2 for his trouble) and I sauntered over to a booth where there were some maracas. I thought picking up an instrument of some sort would have been interesting (I’m always on the search for new percussion instruments) and after talking with him for ten minutes he came back with the price of $80USD! At that point Vero has came over to the booth with me and we said “No thanks.” While I understand they skyrocket their prices so we can barter together, I felt that this was a little too high of a price to start off with. 😉 I had all week to go back so I had no qualms of leaving him in the dust.

We finally headed to the beach for the first time and it was quite large. The water was the bluest of the blue (as seen in any travel brochure for any tropical area) and the sand was nice on the feet. There were palm trees everywhere and loads of beach chairs to lay upon. Of course, while Vero and I searched around for people, we realized that the best place to search would be the bar on the beach and sure enough we found her family there. After grabbing a few drinks, we walked over to the area which would become our home for the next week. At this point, there are no topless people (other than men) seen. From the looks of it, it is a lot of people from Canada…t-shirts, bags, hats, all from Canada. Interesting.

Vero’s sister Andréane and I hit the water and the waves were amazing. The ocean is so much more exciting than the lake front. These waves literally pummel you back into the beach! We had fun trying to float on top of the crashing waves back into the beach. The salt was stinging my poor, poor eyes and at one point Andréane had a great laugh because I was blind and one wave hit me into the beach and then another wave came back from the opposite direction and hit me. I was being knocked around by the force of the waves! I almost lost my bathing suit a few times. Clearly I picked up the wrong size for the trip. There was also a giant shipwreck in the ocean about a couple of miles away from the beach. From what we found out, it was a fishing cruiser that broke it’s hull in the 1920s. It’s now rusted and you can see the immensity of the waves crashing upon it.

Around the late afternoon we returned to our room, had a shower and dressed up for the first a-la-carte restaurant of the night…the Mexican restaurant! It was great food (fajitas), great waiters who really played up the parts of Mexicans…full outfits with sombrerors and even a gun holster with a bottle of tequila and shot glasses as his bullets!

After dinner we went to the first theatrical show of the week – the Michael Jackson Show (Maren, this is for you.) It consisted of dance numbers with a Michael Jackson impersonator. They did a pretty good job actually and I really enjoyed their number for the song Bad. A lot of break dancing and if I would know the videos more (here’s where I was thinking of Maren), I’m sure they choreographed it exactly like the video. They had the classics as well; Thriller, Billie Jean…full with the moonwalk and all.

I retired early and let Vero and the others go and party it up as I was burnt out after the first real day there. So far, so good.

iplaying: Glass and The Ghost Children – The Smashing Pumpkins (Machina Acoustic Demos)