[Pink Pig Time Machine by Wilfrid: January 11, 2009]
Of course, as you all remember, New Year's Eve 1999 fell on a Friday. This created the opportunity for a long weekend of celebrations everywhere, but perhaps nowhere took advantage quite like the Dominican Republic.
Santo Domingo likes to party. It likes to party every weekend, party harder for New Year, and when one finds the turn of a millenium scheduled for a Friday night, a seventy-two hour party is a safe bet.
And so, as Saturday turned to Sunday, I could still find almost nowhere open in the city. People were still drinking - at home, which means in the street, and at corner bodegas. I settled down with an appropriate read - Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry's desperately poetic tale of over-refreshment in Mexico. I also had an example of Dominican magical realism to hand - Viriato Sención's Los Que Falsificaron La Firma De Dios, a novel of politics and cockfighting set in the days of Joaquín Balaguer's allegedly elected dictatorship.
By Monday, the more respectable restaurants had rubbed their eyes and opened their doors. Dinner was at Vesuvio, the exemplary Italian-seafood veteran on the Malecón: jamón (actually carpaccio) of octopus and conch, followed by a huge fritura de mariscos - salt and freshwater langoustine, shrimp, mussels, local fish, crisply fried and served with wedges of lime and papas fritas. A coconut flan to follow.
Next day, a wander in warm drizzle around the botanical gardens, and then a drive to Villa Mella for lunch. Villa Mella is one of the poorer neighborhoods in a city of very poor neighborhoods; the main stretch is lined with wooden huts serving every part of the pig, probably including the squeal, from animals freshly slaughtered and often cooked on nearby waste-ground fires. The pork here is unbelievable, but you go to Villa Mella for the unmentionable parts: intestines, blood sausage, tongue, gristly longaniza sausages, turned in a hot pan to order and served with cold beer, boiled yucca, fried batata (sweet potato) and more lime wedges.
This can make for a heavy lunch - so cheap it seems to a visitor almost free - and so the evening was devoted to a stroll around a pedestrian nightlife quarter in the modern part of the city, snacking on empanadas and "medianoche" sandwiches (a sort of mini-Cubano on soft bread).
Halfway through the week, I moved from the showy Renaissance Jaragua hotel and casino to lodgings in the old part of the city. Less swish, but easier to walk to interesting sights. I spent some time in the splendid, seventy year-old Cafeteria Bar on the Calle Conde, and lunched at the Museo del Jamón opposite the Alcazar - the house that Columbus built. Spanish style food: jamón serrano, salchichónn de lomo. Dinner was at the dining room on the first floor of the hotel: braised goat, fries, beer.
Having relocated to the so-called Zona Colonial, the tangle of streets which grew around Coluumbus's first settlement - including Calle de las Damas, the oldest street in the Americas - it was time to visit museums. My favorite was the Museo de la Familia Dominicana in the beautiful, early sixteenth century Casa de Tostado. It displays the furnishings and household art of the nineteenth century Dominican haute bourgeoisie - a sort of Caribbean version of the Spanish upper middle class.
Reading my way into Dominican history, I also visited the Museo del Duarte, a shrine to Juan Pablo Duarte, one of the nation's three libertadores, established in his family home. Duarte is revered in the DR, although I sometime wonder why. Through his activism in the patriotic Trinitario underground, he certainly contributed to the concept of a Dominican nation independent of Haiti (until the revolution of 1844, Haiti occupied - and black, French-speaking Haitians governed - the entire island). When the fighting started, however, he hopped it to Venezuala, leaving the other two honored liberators, Francisco Sanchez and Ramón Mella, to declare independence in Santo Domingo. On his return, Duarte tried, and failed, to take command of the Dominican army, which consisted chiefly of laborers from the fields of its general, Pedro Santana - who sent Duarte back into exile when he became president. The father of the country Duarte nevertheless remains.
Dinner that evening was at La Briciola - Italian food, far from cutting edge, but served in a gorgeous setting: the courtyard of a seventeenth century villa in the old city. Lobster bisque, osso bucco, a 1989 Marques de Cáceres Gran Reserva. And so to bed.
