Santo Domingo's museums are clustered around what is now known as the "cultural plaza." It was built as a palace for the dictator Rafael Trujillo and was "donated" to the state after he left office (or rather was forced from office thanks to the unfortunate incident of his assassination) and is a leafy piece of tranquility in the middle of the tumult of Santo Domingo.
I was there a little early for the museums to open, and so had a little walk around the park, finding the obligatory statue of Don Quixote (pictured) - I really should collect these from every Spanish-speaking city that I visit - and grabbing an ice-lolly for breakfast (apparantly my entire RDA of vitimin C).
The museums were great; I visited the modern art gallery, the museum of the Dominican man (which looks at the history of the first peoples on the island) and the Natural History museum (which looks at all the endemic species in the Caribbean) but again, sadly, all exhibits were in Spanish only. Still, if nothing else, this trip is improving my language skills!
And so it was on to the plane for my mid-afternoon flight to Miami. Under a two hour flight, but I wasn't in the hostel until after seven, thanks in no small part to US customs which ended up taking almost as much time out of my day as the flight itself. I'm sure most people reading this had travelled to the US before so don't need telling; but it is an absolute nightmare.
Anyway, so there's a party on in the hostel now, which I'm about to join, and then tomorrow I'm going to try to sniff out some of the city's best musueums. It's a pretty enormous place compared to the rest of my trip so far!! Wish me luck.
Jx
No comments:
Post a Comment