boys in barrels

we were out looking at land this morning, driving along dirt roads well off the beaten path. stuck waiting for a truck to pass on the narrow road, we came across this group of boys having fun. the first thing that struck me was that they were being entertained by barrels. i told Veronica to grab the shot and while she did so, i noticed the Red Sox shirt on one of them! nice! only about 100 feet before coming across these boys there was a guy walking up the road wearing a Sox hat. i had a thought then which was to do a series of photos on Red Sox (los Medias Rojas) fans in the DR. there probably is not a day that goes by without seeing someone wearing some Sox, or heaven forbid Yankees, garb.

i am very excited about the Red Sox of course. wish we were in Boston now for the games.....

watching the sox in the DR

sox won tonight and are up 1-0 in games in the ALCS. nice! i had to post a shot of the sox and liked this one of Manny from the ALDS series when he hit the walkoff homer. hope i don't get in trouble with posting that pic but they offer it as wallpaper, so i thought it would be OK.

we are of course watching the sox playoff games as we did all season with the regular games. tonight's game was only in Spanish, which is never my favorite way of watching due to my (still) not understanding the language. (very bad of me, i know). they actually cut over to the Rockies/Diamondbacks game when Gag-Me came in for the 9th. perhaps they did not want to watch him pitch - i don't blame them - but then i had to switch over to watching the game on MLB's Gameday little app. with the sox win in the bag, i am now watching the other game which is in English on ESPN interestingly enough. Fox has the TV rights but somehow ESPN gets to show the playoff games here as long as their ads are only ESPN ads.

speaking of ads, during the regular season games, they play like 5 ads over and over. it's beer, rum, banks, the local viagra (la Pela), telcos, paint. Presidente, Brugal, Banco Popular, La Pela, Orange/Claro/Verizon, and Pinturas Toucan. every ad has some sort of singing in it. you know like the catchy tune to make you remember the product. well, when you see these ads over and over again for 3 hours during a game, possibly several times a week, they can drive you crazy! we are often singing the Pinturas Toucan song, which is just so pathetic, but that's what repetition does.

by far the funniest ad has to be for La Pela (the local Viagra). it's a cartoon with granny bouncing through the house with her boobs swinging every which way. the boyfriend/husband of the daughter comes over with some flowers and granny keeps boogeying because she is obviously happy with this match-up. however the flowers start to droop and the daughter becomes upset. her father, at least i think it is him, is comforting her. granny then pops a La Pela into the vase and bang, up the plants spring to life! granny does some more boogeying with boobs going every which way and everyone is happy.

interesting how they use multiple generations in the ad. the previous ad that they had was the same way. that involved a toll booth and a toll booth arm. this new one is way better!

anyway back to baseball. i had tickets to tomorrow night's game at Fenway....won't be making it. :-( i seriously thought about it, but it was just too much money to fly up there and we're busy with clients. if they hadn't won it in 2004, i probably would have gone. i'm still wondering what i'll do if they make it to the World Series. it would be tough to not be in Boston for that. no jinxing here - i did not say they were going to make it, though tonight was certainly a good start. go sox!

what, you mean you didn't want orange curtain bars?

ok, so the challenges of furnishing the apartment continue. yesterday our curtain lady and her helper arrived at the condo to install the curtains. they came by taxi with the 9 foot curtain bars hanging vertically out the window. we had asked for brown colored bars that matched some accents on the curtains. well, she showed up with ORANGE colored bars. Veronica and I look at them, shake our heads wondering how she could have picked that color, and seriously contemplate just taking them since it would require the curtain lady to make a return to Santiago. well, neither one of us could swallow the color, so unfortunately for her, as it was her mistake, she has to make the trip to Santiago. having arrived by taxi to the condo, obviously she does not have car (not surprising actually). this means it will take her all day by public transport to go to Santiago and back.

we tried to help her out by seeing if they had bars at the hardware store here in Cabarete or at Hidelisa in Puerto Plata, but no luck of course. wrong colors and not the right size. that is often the experience here - half stocked store shelfs with not what you want or not enough of what you want. this was one of the many moments here when you just wish you had a Home Depot at your disposal.

on to the next fiasco...we pick up our bedside tables that we had made. see picture above of the guy doing the last few steps of the production. the good news was the guy finished with them on time. a real novelty here. the bad news was despite having a drawing in hand that Veronica had made of the design she wanted, he managed to screw it up. we wanted the main side to have an open shelf. well, he put the opening on one of the sides. the tables were 16X18. he made the opening on the 16" side. if you think about how the tables will be used, one would never have done that.

oh yeah, also the bedside tables are like this reddish brown color. totally NOT the color we wanted either. we probably should have gone to see a sample first of the color on a small portion of one of the tables and then given the green light or not on the color. next time....

so in both cases we said exactly what we wanted and did not get it. what up with following directions? in the case of the woodworker, he just didn't pay attention. in the case of the curtain lady, my guess is that she went to a few shops and they did not have the color we wanted and she just winged it with another color. in her case, i can kind of forgive because i know how difficult it can be to find exactly what you want here in shops that are unpredictably stocked. even if you did call ahead to inquire if they had something you wanted, you could very well go there only to find out that no they don't actually have that color and wouldn't orange be fine anyway? NO IT WOULD NOT.

curtains are washable, right?

here's V in the post office in Puerto Plata, which was one of two errands we needed to do there today. the post office errand was successful and the other was not. let's start out on the positive with the post office. we went there to pick up a book that V had ordered.

here's the story on the infamous book. V had ordered it in July (yes, July) for a class that she wanted to take online. it was going to be hand delivered by one of our clients, Dennis, who was coming down from NJ. unfortunately the book did not make it to his house prior to his trip down here. so upon returning to the US, Dennis shipped it by Global Priority Mail with a promise from them of it being in the DR within 5-10 days. so by mid August it should have been here. it wasn't. we prodded our office to send someone to the Sosua post office more frequently than the usual once a month trip that they make to pick up the office's mail to see if it had arrived. (yes, once a month they go and pick up the mail.) well, of course, it's not so easy to ship something to the DR and days and weeks went by without the book arriving. V canceled her class because how could she take the class without the book? i said i thought it would take like 3 months and V would have to pay a duty of some sort, as that is what happens when packages are held up usually. it's a way for them to make money because of course you should have to pay some tax for a new book. well, the other day, a blue notice arrived from the Puerto Plata post office that there was something there for V. so off we went today to get the book that is no longer needed.

V had to pay the man at the post office 100 pesos (slight more than $3) for reasons not totally known as V couldn't really follow his explanation. probably the duty. that was a relief to her as she was expecting it to be 1000 pesos. i just took pictures of the place while she negotiated her way with the guy behind the bars that look like what they used to have at banks in the old days.

here's the post office:


it is run down one the second floor but could be a very nice looking building if it was restored. it's 2 blocks from the Malecon and the ocean. it is for sale. i wonder how much they want for it.

now on to the unsuccessful part of the trip. we went to Hidelisa to pick up the curtains that had been made for the Blue Fish condo. we had selected white material. probably the wrong choice since when we inspected the curtains, we found that half of them were dirty and/or had water stains. remember from my previous blog entry that sometimes the fabric rolls are strewn on the floor there. on the roll of material that we had chosen, we had seen that it was dirty at the beginning of the roll and told the saleswoman to make sure to not use that part. i mean it seemed like such commmonsense, but we did feel the need to say it because, you know, you have to not assume anything here. well, they used the dirty part anyway. :-(

so tell me, what do you think went on in the brain of the seamstress? "oh, let me use the dirty part of the material." or "geez, they're going to get dirty anyway, who cares, i'll just use the dirty part." or "oh this dirty part, they can just wash the curtains before hanging them up." or maybe they just weren't thinking.....

the funny thing is the saleswoman who we had worked with us on the measurements didn't have much of an apology nor did she seem surprised in anyway with the situation. probably happens all the time....

well today i was not amused by the STUPIDITY. it's a 40 minute drive to Puerto Plata and back. so we have to slog there again on Saturday to pick up the rest of the curtains that they will redo. i'll take a picture of the inside of the shop so we can remember the strewn fabric rolls and chuckle at it all later.

i certainly hope that this is the only folly with the things that we are having made, but somehow i suspect we still have some glitches to encounter with our furniture and other curtains. nothing is easy here.

cable TV

our cable TV was out for 4 days. some ninkumpoop at the cable TV company hit the wrong switch or something and deactivated all the cable boxes in Cabarete. this meant that they had to manually type in the numbers of each and every individual cable box in Cabarete to reactivate the cable TV. you can imagine that this took quite some time. i think they actually figured out how to switch some back on in bulk, but this took 4 days. nevermind that i am sure no one gets their money back for 4 days of missing service.

up until yesterday, i was not actually that bothered by the lack of TV since i am enjoying a good book right now, Dark Star Safari, which is about a guy who travels from Cairo to Cape Town by bus/train/car/ferry/African guagua/whatever but no planes. yesterday though i was starting to get stressed because the Sox playoff games start tomorrow. today would have been panic day with a trip to the cable TV office which is about as fun as poking your eye with a nail. the lady in the office couldn't care less if your cable is out. it's such a helpless feeling. it reminds me of all the IT departments i ever had to deal with back in my desk job days. they're supposed to be there for you, to assist you. customer service, you know? yet somehow the tables are turned and you have to beg them to do something for you. throw in that it is in another language and forget it, you are totally at their mercy.

anyway, thank god our cable is back. we still have a horrific noise when we switch to some of the channels, which we have had ever since they came to install the cable. i just cannot be bothered to try to get them to fix it. again i'd rather not poke a nail in my eye, you know?