Música

Our first week and a half or so here was lots of orientation stuff. I’m probably not going to write about everything we did—and certainly not in order. One cool thing we did was go to a Jazz concert in a fancy bar at a concert hall by the monument. It was a little strange in that it felt more like the states than anything I’d been to yet. But the band was really good, and I especially liked it when they brought in an accordian to give it a more Latin feel!

We chose classes, had some tours, and had some dinners together. One Saturday we went to Pequeños Pasitos—the rural clinic we work at for our Medicina Comunitaria class. I’ll say more about that later. We went out to a couple of discotecs, which were fine, but kind of disappointing compared to Jarabacoa. No bachata whatsoever, only a little merengue, and way too much reggaeton/grinding. But one evening I went with my family to a bar near the monument—that was fun! It was a live merengue band, and a lot of people were there. I danced merengue with Papi and Carlos José, and my parents were thoroughly impressed. I couldn’t dance much though, being there with my family and all. Oh, one night we went to a rock concert of a college band from PUCMM—friends of Laura, our Lily’s daughter. They were good! It really reminded me of going out to see Sliver or Sasquatch, and I got kind of nostalgic when the drummer had to take down his drums by himself.

Once more musical even worth mentioning. There was a big summer concert here at the monument—and it was free! A bunch of us when on a Saturday night. When we got there some band I don’t know was playing. We stood kind of towards the back for awhile. But as the music got better and more people came in, David and I decided we wanted to make our way to the front. We snuck our way through the crowd until we were pretty close to the stage. We watched Tito Swing, an excellent performer! He had facepaint on and a funny costume, and he was a really good dancer. It was a little sad when he went around playing all the instruments on one of the songs though, because he can’t play only instruments well. Kiko el Presidente was good. Then there were others I don’t remember. Sexappeal was very suave. Then Jeffery came on, and David and I were utterly blown away at the ridiculousness of his performance! Every song it was a different outfit—one of them was a tight gold suit—different dancers, like girls wearing scanty camoflauge, ballet dancing men dressed all in white, lots of girls in gigantic red and white Spanish dresses with poofy skirts—and a ton of lights and smoke. One song he actually stood on a lighted moving pedestal with smoke flowing up around him.

Finally Omega came on—awesome! It was kind of a rush to see him live. I think that’s how everyone in the crown felt. You could tell Omega knew it though, because he wasn’t putting all that much effort in. Still, he seemed like he was relaxed and just having a good time performing. Oh, and the best part was the backup singer guys—they’re hilarious, and all they really do is dance around and yell “El Fuerte” every so often.