the coriolis effect

Santo Domingo is: stone churches half a millennia old overlooking tony bars built fronting Columbus's fortress. It's playing "spot the tourist" for beginners: any older white men wearing shorts- not pants- and frequently plaid shirts, with straw hat and sandal wearing wives a few steps ahead (why else would they be trolling Calle el Conde, shopping for larimar, instead of holed up in some air conditioned hotel bar?), younger couples, backpacks in tow, or the occasional Dutch or German family. It's music, at all hours of day or night. Blackouts, and terror, and here we are, 30 minutes from the nearest hospital and the bridge back to the capital albeit rebuilt after the flood waters took it is still unpaved, but things are all right in the end, calm enough to stay by the sea and watch the moonset. I noted with amusement the kiddy ride we plopped my cousin down on (second cousin um, twice removed?)- Sylvester but with Tweety firmly in hand. Santo Domingo has become el Faro, the lighthouse, where the remains (one version) of Columbus are buried, huge, monolithic, on the outskirts of town (like all the Boer monuments in South Africa, I couldn't help but notice, although here the shared patrimony stretches back 3 more centuries of generations) distracting but not completely from the perfect red orb of a sun, setting. In the wide plaza to its northern side boys are playing baseball, girls are bumping around a volleyball, and a small contingent of others are stretching in time to an exercise routine dictated from a van (that is gone 20 minutes later).

It's nisperos and papaya and limonada and presidente, and reading feast of the goat and da vinci code but not, as of yet, writing my thesis, really.

its decadence, here, but under a perpetually young blue sky.