Week 4 Continued...Santo Domingo!

Thursday morning we woke up early and hopped on a bus to Santo Domingo!  It's about a four hour bus drive, and the buses have AC which feels so good after sweating all day every day in our house haha.  We spent the first day here checking into our airbnb and wandering around the streets by our house.  Our airbnb feels like a mansion to us because it has AC, warm showers, running water, an oven to make cookies/brownies in, a tv, and wifi that actually works.  We were in love from the moment we stepped inside.  We walked around the streets a little bit right after we got settled in which was gorgeous.  About a 5-10 minute walk away from our place is the main street in Zona Colonial (the older area of Santo Domingo with cathedrals and old ruins and buildings) with lots of vendors, restaurants and artists selling their paintings.  It was so so pretty, and we stopped at the super market there to buy a few groceries to last us through the next couple days.  We also went to a super yummy pizzeria which hit the spot!  We spent the rest of the night enjoying wifi and Netflix at our place and eating warm homemade cookies :)

Friday morning we woke up and made chocolate-chip pancakes since we had a stove :)  We all love food and love that we have a little kitchen for the weekend!!  After breakfast we headed to Tres Ojos, which is a national park close by that has cool lakes, rocks and trees everywhere.  Our favorite lake was one that we had to take a little boat ride to get to.  There was a dock there and the water was such a beautiful turquoise color, especially when the sun shone right on it!

After Tres Ojos, we headed back to the plaza by our house to grab some lunch and walk around!  We found a yummy restaurant right on the plaza, my friends fed some pigeons on the square and then we went to the Chocolate Museum!  We didn't stay there for very long but I wanted to pick up some dark chocolate for my dad :) And the packaging on the chocolate was SO cute.  Also, right next to the restaurant we ate at there was an 'Amber Museum'!  There is Amber everywhere here which is fun to see my name everywhere haha.

We took a quick breather at home and charged up our phones a bit then Ashland, Alyssa and I wanted to go rent bikes for a few hours to ride around the streets in Zona Colonial.  It was so so pretty.  We loved looking at all of the windows, walls and flowers everywhere.  We felt like we were in a European city or something, it was so pretty.  And afterwards we rewarded ourselves with some churros with nutella :)

Friday night we brought out our big mattress in the living room so we could watch movies on a megabed and sleep out there (while eating brownies and ice cream of course).  Best decision ever, love these chicas.

Friday morning we slept in which felt so nice!  We knew that there was a mall nearby that was somewhat American so we decided to spend the mall there.  We spent all morning at Agora Mall, got matching pjs at Forever 21, got hand sanitizer at Bath and Body Works to keep me from getting sick from my students, and we went upstairs in the mall and found a bunch of American fast food restaurants which was a fun surprise! There was also a movie theater in the mall which was fun to discover! These are our matching avocado pjs haha, we love love love the avocados here and just had to get these when we saw them.  Don't know how I would survive all of this without these girls!

After the mall we walked for a minute to Office Depot for Alyssa to find a pen (long story haha).  We were going to go to the beach but found out it was farther away than we thought, so we headed back to our place!  We hung out in our pjs, watched some Netflix (we're taking advantage of it working here before we go back to Puerto Plata where Netflix doesn't work haha) and then made some spaghetti for dinner which hit the spot!  After dinner we walked around the streets again for a while, looked at the street performers at artists and got a fresh smoothie before we headed in for the night!  We are going to miss these streets, they are so fun to just walk around on.

These are some pictures of Plaza de Espana right by our house, so so beautiful!!

We watched lots of Netflix and used lots of wifi on the last day while we could haha!  We ended up getting our laundry done at a laundromat here because our washer at home makes our clothes smell weird!  We also took advantage of our oven for the last little bit that we had one and made more chocolate chip cookies :)