Around the World in Five Days

As things were a bit too "tranquilo" in my site, I decided to take a crazy vacation to literally the OTHER side of the island. I left in a hurry on Thursday for the capital, hoping to get my greencard. When that plan failed, I proceeded to do what we ALWAYS do in the capital: eat american food and spend way too much money. On Friday, Alan and I decided to make the insane journey to Miches, to meet up with Kevin and Zoe and begin Zoe's birthday celebrations. We had to take a taxi to the guagua stop, then about a 2 hour bus ride to El Seibo. The hilarious part was that, while passing through El Seibo, we literally drove RIGHT by Kristen (the volunteer who works there) as she was walking home. Then, we had to get in a CRAMMED van that, of course, was a piece of crap. Smashed in the back seat, our neighbors started asking us why we are here, where we are from, etc. Creepily enough, some guy sitting in front of us said, "Yeah, you used to be in Sabana de la Mar with some other girls, right?" "And you had a going away party where someone drove up in a big truck with speakers." He said that he knows that I used to go to the discoteca and dance merengue and bachata. He even asked if I was from South Dakota...which I am not...but Kelsi is! So creepy! I have no idea how he knew all of that! It is so weird being practically famous.
As we flew around the mountain bends in the peace of junk van, we finally arrived about two hours later in Miches. Kevin has an AWESOME apartment right on the ocean. He even has four rocking chairs! We began by chatting and having some Presidentes, and somehow ended up going on a tour of the pueblo's street eateries. We ultimately made some ""friends," one of whom turned out to be a freak and kept telling me that he was in love with me and referring to me as the espanola. Fortunately, Kevin's host-second-cousin came to the rescue in his insanely nice SUV (we are not quite sure where he gets the money for it...or if we want to know), and he drove us right to the discoteca that was up in the trees. We went home shortly thereafter, but definitely weren't going to be getting up at 5am as planned.
The next morning (Saturday), we all hurried over to another guagua and began the four-hour trek out to Bavaro for our night at the all-inclusive hotel. We didn't get there until around 1pm and had to wait until 3 to get the rooms (because I, classically, made the reservations for the wrong day). We started by eating right away...though, to our utter dismay, the food was nothing to write home about. We did have fun drinking the girly drinks at the bar ("coco loco," pina colada, etc)...though after a few we started feeling sick from all of the sugar. We eventually got to our rooms...which were really neat little lofts...and headed out to the beach. Kevin and Zoe decided that, as we all need to get our money's worth, we really should eat, vomit, eat, vomit, etc. in order to try ALL of the restaurants. The plan, thankfully, didn't quite catch on. After dinner we saw a few minutes of the "tropicalissimo"show which couldn't have been more lame, and headed over to the disco. The disco was cheesy as well, but the americans (there was a huge group of peace corps volunteers celebrating one year in country) had a BLAST getting down to Usher and 50 cent. The next morning, however, we awoke to MORE travelling...