Paradiso

After all of our wedding bliss, Mike and I took a few days to relax at home, take care of business and pack for our wonderful honeymoon!!  We took this opportunity to go to the bank and set up our account, turned in our marriage license so that upon our return I can start on the fun process of changing all of my legal documents, and to reorganize after all of the wedding festivities!!  Also, I changed my name on my facebook account - and have been getting messages saying - ¨"I saw a message from Stephanie Fujii, and was like - uh, who is that?"  I asked myself the same thing.  It is definitely going to take a while to get used to seeing those two names together, and will be even more of a challenge when I start school next month.  I know I have said this many times before, but I will really miss being Ms. G, as silly as it may sound!!

Our table filled with lovely gifts!

Sunday night, Mike and I ordered take out from our favorite Thai restaurant down the street.  We organized all of the gifts and took our time opening them and enjoying everything.  (And of course, meticulously adding notes to our thank you list!)  Here are some photos from the day after...

Loved this!  Thanks for all of the great comments!

The dress has seen better days!

Mike may have, too!!

So, anyways, back to "paradiso."  After all of those business tasks, Mike and I left out of SFO on Monday night, and sat in front of, quite seriously, the most annoying child on the face of this planet or any other.  It was on the leg from SFO to Newark, and I kid you not when I tell you that the child cried the ENTIRE TIME.  I know, you are saying that when we have kids, they might do the same thing.  No.  They will not.  We will not take them on a plane until they are old enough to entertain themselves and know what my scary mom face looks like that tells them, without words, that they better zip it up. (you better believe Mike and I had this discussion during this ordeal)  In all seriousness, I did try to consider the child´s point of view.  Maybe his ears were plugged and at nine months old (or so), he doesn´t know how to unplug them.  Maybe he is collicky (I have no idea how to spell that).  I don´t know what his problem was.  And he was not just whimpering. He was BELTING this stomach curdling cry.  Mom wasn´t offering him a bottle or anything.  I almost asked for an airline size bottle of rum to rub in his mouth (hey - I heard it works!).    Mike and I just have bad luck when it comes to traveling and crying kids.  Yet another reason we will not be traveling with our super young ones - we would have a cryer. 

For the second leg of the flight, from Newark to Punta Cana, we upgraded to first class.  Ya baby!  Why not!  It´s our honeymoon, right?  We enjoyed a warm breakfast, and then I woke up from a nap to find a warm cookie on my tray!  Mike said I missed out on the milk, so I informed him that on the way back, he BETTER wake me up for that opporunity.  Delish, and super indulgent. Did this make up for the child from hell?  I think yes.

Reading about all of the fun adventures!

We arrived at the airport in PC, and were greeted with the warm humidity that would stay with us througout our honeymoon.  The airport was open air, just covered by a thatch roof, and only had about 5 "terminals" if you can call them that.  We were greeted by women in full Dominican costume - and then had to buy a tourist card which we promtly handed to the next person in the process, about five feet away.  Both of our bags arrived without incident, and we were off to find our ride to the hotel!  The ride from the airport to our resort was very long.  It is really hard to describe what we saw, as well.  But I will try!

I knew the the DR was a poor country.  But I have never really been exposed to such poverty in my life - something that was very clear to me as soon as we were about ten minutes outside of the airport.  The drive to the resort took about an hour, down a single lane road that somehow fit two cars.  First of all, all of the literature that we got about driving in the DR says, "every driver for himself."  They are not joking.  There were very few stop signs that we saw (but nobody really pays attention to those...), and we skimmed pretty close to quite a few cars...We started things off pretty adventurously!  We looked out the window the entire time - we didn´t want to miss anything.  We saw mostly run down, vacant buildings, piles of rubble and garbage, stray dogs, people walking on the side of the road, etc.  The homes that we saw were very run down - literally corrugated metal that just looked like it was being held up with some mud and a rock.  No kidding.  It is povery like I have never seen, except on the news or in magazines.  There were so many buildings, but just surrounded by barren countryside, and most of them were vacant.  It was like they were brand new, but there was nothing to put in them.  There didn´t appear to be any central town or gathering area.  It was a building here, and then a quarter mile until the next one.  Some buildings we passed, Mike wondered if they were being torn down, or built up - it was pretty hard to tell.  That was the landscape for about 45 minutes of our drive. 

There was also some comedy mixed in here.  About 1/2 of their "taxis" are single person mopeds, and the driver sets himself apart from the non-taxi drivers with a bright orange construction vest.  And, they of course do not obey the single person on a small moped rule.  We passed by one that had a whole family on it - mom against the driver, dad turned with his back on mom's and baby on the handlebars.  Can't judge too much though - everyone loves their kids and has their own standards.  Having said that, however, will I put my kid on the handlebars of a moped in the DR?  Nope.

We started entering the resort area, and of course things changed.  I still have mixed feelings about the juxtaposition of tourism and extreme poverty.  But, we did of course enjoy our time here.  The resorts are just one right after the other.  Ours was pretty far down, and we got to see a couple of the others because we dropped off a few passengers.  Oh, and did I mention, that by the time we were about one half way through our drive, it started pouring down rain?  I am not talking sprinkle, I am talking like raining so hard that it bounces right back up a good couple of inches because it is coming down so hard!  It was crazy.  But, we were on our honeymoon, and really, nothing could dampen our spirits - pun intended ;)

The resort was absolutely beautiful.  Such a cool place.  We checked in, and started the long, long walk to the back of the resort, where Mike and I had booked a spot in an adults only area of the resort.  This was before the screaming child incident, too.  We are just adult only type people at this point in our lives!  Our escort, Hasan, was super friendly, and was so excited to point out all of the great things the resort had to offer.  There were two pools, an ocean view, a huge showroom, covered walkways (now we know why), and overall beautiful grounds.

Thank goodness walkways were covered!

This was taken later in the trip, but it features the daily water aerobics class!  Pretty funny!

We got to the adults only section, we were taken into a lounge where we had our own concierge who was there to take care of whatever we needed.  We were then taken up to the room, which was awesome.  It was a bit mildewy, but what can you expect in a tropical country?  We had our own private balcony which had a hot tub and some lounge furniture.  We had an ocean view, and spent many nights just sitting out there, watching the waves, drinking champagne.  Vita e bellisima.  We had a "living room" area, but we didn't spend any time there, but it was cool, I guess.  There was a bathroom in that part as well, so that was nice.  The bedroom had a four poster canopy bed, and an entrance onto the terrace.  Then a huge bathtub in the middle of the room, and a huge bathroom and walk in closet.  Very luxurious and lovely.  We were glad to have a nice room because we spent more time in there than we had anticipated because it was so rainy, and we couldn't get to the beach!

A very comfy bed!

The adults only section had its own pool and bar, and its own section of the beach. So awesome!!  The pool had bali beds that were almost always vacant, so it was never an issue if we felt like hanging out by the pool.  The ocean had loungers and tiki umbrellas, and it truly felt like a tropical oasis.  There were several restaurants for us to choose from but, interestingly, none of them were Dominican food!  I was really looking forward to sampling the local cuisine, but that was not meant to happen I guess!  There was a French restaurant, a Japanese/Tepanyaki restaurant, an Italian restaurant, two buffets and a sort of "fast food"/I'm out at the club and need some grease type restaurant.  They all had their good parts, and we made sure we tried every single one.  

The first day we just hung out and acclimated.  We took a nap and had cocktails and swam.  The next day we went to a cigar factory - something Mike is really interested in.  We took a little van (very scary ride) with this super nice Puerto Rican family from New York.  We got to see the little eight person assembly line, and were all given cigars to enjoy during our tour (yes, me too!).  We watched the cigars being rolled and then went into their "store" and looked at some other cigars and sampled some mamajuana - basically spiced rum.  It was a very cool experience, especially because I know Mike enjoyed it so much!

Rolling the cigars - very cool process!

Storage

What we did when we got back

The view from our room - rainy but pretty!

Mike's feet - relaxin'

That night, we went to see a show in the big open air showroom.  I was fully expecting an authentic Dominican show so that I could get an idea about their culture.  But, what we got instead, was a Michael Jackson tribute.  No joke.  I was really confused for a moment.  But, they were all Dominican performers, and I have to say that it was absolutely amazing.  They were dancing and lip syncing to all of the great hits, and it was a highly entertaining hour!  Well worth it, but very weird to see something like that in the DR!!

They treated us to lots of "extras" during our stay there, since we were honeymooners.  They had a champagne bottle to welcome us, a special fruit and dessert platter on two separate occasions, a special breakfast, and a candlelit dinner for two!!  Below is a picture of the breakfast - the rest will come later!

Such good fresh fruit!!!

Finally cleared up!!

Check back for another post later, since this only takes us through the first Wednesday!!