We´re here . . .

and so far so good. We only had to leave one classmate in Atlanta, and the word on the street is that Hugo´s passport situation will be sorted out by tomorrow anyway, so as far as I´m concerned we´re batting 1.000.

The travel out here was fairly uneventful, and largely due to my dead-on impression of a homeless guy during our four-hour-long layover in the Atlanta airport, I arrived feeling fairly refreshed. Perhaps the most disconcerting part of the whole flight was when, upon touchdown in Santo Domingo, our fellow passengers began to clap. While that´s apparently normal in the DR--and, indeed, much of Latin America--to me it implies just a bit too strongly the possibility of failure.

Our first night was a fairly uneventful one: after arriving at the Hotel Europa, which looks shockingly like a nightclub with its blue lights after dark, we were taken by our guides to one of the Colonial District´s main thoroughfares, where we proceded to pay too much for dinner at what looked like a tapas bar, but was really a pretty American establishment. You win some, you lose some--although when on vacation, the opportunity cost of those losses stings a little more.

OK, I´m hogging the c. 1998 Dell desktop in the lobby, so that´s all for now!