Carnival in Santiago

It´s been a long day... We woke up at 4:30 am in Jamaica, New Jersey, and returned to JFK airport to board our flight to Santiago. Once we arrived at the terminal in Santiago, we were greeted by a airport employee and escorted to the VIP room (flat screen tv, juice, comfortable couches, marble bathroom) while they chased after our luggage! As for passport check, THEY came to us... After all the stamps were stamped and bags were claimed, we got our rental car. If you are coming out this way, don't believe expedia if they tell you they reserved a car for you, they may just turn around and give it to someone else! Coincidentally, Europcar employee's "friend" at Savings car rental just happened to have a car for us. So now we are driving around in a green Toyota (gasp!) Highlander. It has 4-wheel drive, in case we have to tow around Chris and Carlos´Kia...
About 5 miles outside of the airport we arrived at our hotel and met up with Carlos and Chris. Later in the afternoon, Eduardo´s friend Victor (the reason we were such VIPs at the airport), who also happens to be the president of the Earthquake Engineering Institute of the Dominican Republic, Vitelmo Bertero, met us and told us all he knew about the road conditions to Haiti. We are now printing out map according to his instructions. We cannot waste any time getting lost tomorrow! He has convinced us to drive 1.5 hours south to Santo Domingo and then take the highway from there to the border. The drive should take about 8 hours, putting us in Haiti early in the afternoon.

After all of the business talk, Victor took us into town to show off the carnival festivities. Santiago takes their Carnival seriously and unlike other towns, celebrates it on every Sunday of February, instead of just one. There were a lot of crazy costumes (lechon?), lots of confetti, whips, and small balloons to spank each other with. Oh, and of course, plenty of Presidente beers and cuba libre stands. We were expecting a quiet boring town on a Sunday night, instead we walked into a party.

The guidebooks say that Haiti celebrates similar Carnival, but they probably will not be celebrating it this year. It is very interesting to see how life just goes on, 8 hours of driving away.