It feels weird not to have a pen in my hand.
But the journals took a different turn a few weeks ago, and I sort of stopped writing about what’s going on in my life. So I’m going to jump right to typing for a bit.
Santo Domingo! This was quite some time ago, really. We arrived on a Saturday and stayed that night only. Spent the day doing a bunch of cool touristy stuff which I didn’t take pictures of and will probably see again with Mom and Dad in December so you can hear about it and see pics then. We stayed in the Colonial Zone—third time now!—in some very chill hostels. Not as cool as Bettye’s (not sure that’s possible, really) especially since there were private rooms, but I still liked them. I took note of the one the other half of the group stayed in for a possible place to stay on a trip back.
I was pretty out of it that day. I was in the middle of a 5-day stretch of three exams and two grant application deadlines, and hadn’t been sleeping. So most of the time spent in the guagua I was studying, and I was fairly quiet on our tours of stuff. But the part I really cared about was the Daddy Yankee concert that night, so I finally got to relax when we got there. It was an excellent experience. It was the craziest concert I’d ever been to, and that includes the Deftones one where I got crushed so hard I stopped breathing, was nearly trampled, and did some serious damage to my ears.
The concert was outdoors in a center probably the size of the Xcel, perhaps a bit smaller. As we walked up, we thought we were really early since there were hardly any people around. But it turned out we had approached the center from a weird direction, and when we finally approached the entrance we saw just how many people there were! It was packed! I don’t really know what to compare it to. It was crazier than downtown on game night. We got in a line that was already very, very long, and vendors walked up and down selling food and water.
The line moved slowly. As we got closer, it got steadily more disorganized. Apparently Dominicans do this thing where when the lines get sufficiently disorganized, everyone cuts loose and runs ahead as fast as possible, screaming. We didn’t like it at first. But after watching a few times, you sort of got the rhythm of it. So when David decided to run, I threw caution to the wind and ran after him. We hopped in a sort of trotting line as things slowed. Each person put their hands on the shoulders or back of the person ahead to try to keep their place in line, and you sort of had to hold on when everyone ran. It was exhilarating, and perhaps I’m stereotyping here, but it felt like an experience exquisitely Dominican.
Waited for the rest of the group inside the entrance. Found a spot to stand among the crowds (we bought general admission tickets) and Jenn and I got some pizza. Then the music started.
To be honest, I have no idea who the first bands were. They started significantly late, as I expected. I’m pretty sure it was dark by then. David and I wanted to give getting up close another shot like at the Omega concert, so we started inching forward, hoping to get up to the fence that separated us from the next area (what would have been the floor in a better organized event center). But we hadn’t gotten far when all hell broke loose and everyone was running. At first all I wanted to do was follow David and Stacy so I ran for it. I reached the fence—it had been broken down and the crowd was hell-bent-for-leather to get over it before security came, that’s what the commotion was. There was a girl on the ground by the fence and people were climbing over her. I grabbed her yanked her up and over the fence and out of the way and then kept running. David, Stacy and I made it to a decent spot by the time all the running had stopped.
I don’t remember much about the music at this point. I remember it was hot and crowded—crowded like the Deftones concert and the pit at Sonshine the Omega concert but much hotter. They’d spray a hose over the crowd every so often like they do at Sonshine but it always missed the area where we were. So people got hot and cranky and rowdy. We weren’t far from the fence to the VIP area, and people were walking up and down that fence selling bottles of water. We kept trying to get in on the action but we were too far back. Everyone around us started rioting. At one point there was a water bottle throwing fight. We gradually moved closer and closer to the fence, with people shoving like crazy to get close enough for water.It was like some kind of social experiment—people practically turned into animals for water (you know, the way we really are as a species but hate to admit). I observed later to David that it was a nice metaphor for the problem of societies with class stratification—water being the scarce resource in the “lower class” and it’s scarcity being the reason for increased “crime.”
After a while I felt pretty significantly sick, so I make my way out to look for water. There wasn’t any, so I ordered up a virgin vodka cranberry. I ran into Mollie and Christina, who didn’t seem real happy with the group being split up. I invited them to follow me but they couldn’t make it through the crowd, so we set a meeting place for later. I found David and Stacy again. Not too much later Don Omar started. I more impressed with his music than any other artist that night. I’d had no idea his music was so varied, and the performance was full of energy. But I couldn’t pay as much attention as I would have liked; with no sleep, the heat, and dehydration I was practically sleeping for a good chunk of it. I don’t know whether it was dreaming or hallucination but I kept thought I was seeing things in front of me, and then I’d snap awake and realize where I was for a few minutes before drifting off again.
Eventually David, Stacy, and I hopped the fence into the VIP area where there was slightly more space, and after a bit of hunting, water! Quite a few people were standing or sitting on chairs—evidently the people who had actually bought VIP tickets. But there were a lot more people than that. Security had evidently decided to help people hop the fence at a slow rate to keep things somewhat sane on the other side. We couldn’t find a spot with a good view for a bit of it, but when we did, the show was colorful and impressive. It got more crowded over time, and there was a group of schoolgirls near us. At one point one of them fainted and had to be carried out on a stretcher. After a while, I got a call from the rest of the group. They’d gathered at our meeting spot and wanted us out before Daddy Yankee started. Stacy, David, and I didn’t want to give up our excellent view, so I said I’d go out and see what the deal was and then call. I found everyone cranky, and there was some whining and yelling. Couldn’t get a hold of David, so I stayed and watched Daddy Yankee from the sidelines till they made it out. The tech work on his performance was great; in the first song they swung him out over the crowd on a sort of crane. But the music was badly remixed and he lacked energy. We headed out before he finished and got home very late. Overall, it was a fabulous cultural experience, and I vowed to find Don Omar’s discography.
