Over the years I have had a variety of birthday parties, though turning a year older has lost its lustre since pass-the-parcel was relegated from the celebrations. This year’s celebration was interesting, unplanned and very bizarre.

My original plan was to head down to Santo Domingo and celebrate with a traditional birthday drinking session with some chums, but this fell through at the last minute. I then began to plan to spend the Great Day in the village, drinking some beers, loosing at billiards and trying extremely hard not to do any work. This last plan was broken by about midday, as I found myself trundling through the village on the bike, in search of a conversation about the minute and mundane details of life and work in the rural DR. I passed some friends who were busy working at the country cottage of one of the rich Santo Domingo folk, and who were occupied with injecting orange juice into the backside of dead pig. It turns out that they were marinating the animal which was to be roast at the birthday party of an extremely wealthy and famous Dominican, whose weekend home it was.

Of course, I couldn’t resist introducing myself to the man himself, who was busy wondering why a Gringo had just walked into his estate and interrupted a very important task. He was so shocked to hear that we shared a birthday that he couldn’t help inviting this complete stranger to his party. And that is how I ended up at the party of someone who I had only met before in the society pages of Santo Domingo newspapers.

In some ways, it was a distressingly low scale affair, just twenty or so rich businessmen and other friends from the capital, plus a couple of local employees. Whilst the pig was roasting, I got force fed whisky. Disappointingly it was Johnnie Walker, and for a man who is known for his ownership of a large beverage company, amongst other things, there was none of the family product. And of course, it was a long afternoon, so I had to keep drinking. It was not difficult, given the presence of free alcohol – you can take the Scotsman out of Scotland, but you can’t take the Scotland out of the Scotsman. Of course, given the amount of Scotch this Scotsman was putting in himself, there may have been a temptation to get that Scotsman back into Scotland. But the party kept in good spirits (with the exception of the Johnnie Walker).

The man himself was thoroughly charming, and we all had a good time drinking, chatting and eating roast pork after four hours cooking time. After the food it was time for a traditional activity here in the mountains, called “Teaching the Gringo to Dance Whilst Trying Not to Laugh, or Wince When He Steps on My Toes. Again.”.

Very patient, and all excellent dancers. Quote of the evening must be “keep your shoulders still and move the hips. Imagine that you are making love to a beautiful woman.”. My bad dancing was one of two faux pas in the evening; chatting to a major industrialist about his business I commented on how much I enjoyed a particular product of his, only to be met with a stony silence. I then realised that I had just mentioned not his product, but the major rival brand.

As I lived only a few minutes walk, they simply would not let me leave as people slowly departed for home. I ended up in a hardcore group of 5, drinking and singing along the explicit lyrics of various Dominican hit songs. Dominican country music shares the same universal themes as traditional rural music in other areas – drink and women, but combining these with Carry On lyrics. I seem to remember one with a chorus that went “Juana, peel my Banana”. We were all rather drunk, though I have to say that these fellows can’t hold it well, as I have vague memories of someone comically falling into a pot plant. A great time with the sort of people who I would have imagined that I would detest, but who turn out to be kind and generous.

It goes without saying that I am currently engaged in detailed research into local hangover cures.

There is an anthropological approach called participant observation, which translates as learning through doing; in order to understand a group, one must behave as they do.

Now, anthropologists have a tendency to do stupid things. For example, I was recently reading an anthropology paper that stated “Somehow, I find the point easier to make in verse”, and then proceeded with 60 lines of tortuously bad verse to prove a pointless point (if you don’t believe me, the reference is Tilly, C. 1991. Dominance, resistance, compliance... discourse. Sociological Forum 6 (3):593-602.). Frankly, any discipline that prefers to make their academic arguments in verse deserves something a tad stronger than contempt. However, participant observation has some merits, mainly that it can be a lot of fun.

In the spirit of understanding the community better through participating in their activities, I have now joined the chicken owning society. This is an important activity in the village, for eggs, for meat and for cockfighting. Cockfighting is central to the lives of the men in the village, and many an hour is spent tending to and talking about their cocks. Incidentally, a cockfight is perhaps not worth the talk: twelve minutes of flapping wings and pecking beaks. It is rather undignified and inelegant, less resembling Queensbury rules championship boxing, and more like drunken women outside sleazy nightclubs at 3AM on a wet Saturday night in Manchester. Perhaps out on a hen night.

The animal that I now own is a young cockerel that was deemed by the owner to be too weak and wimpy to fight, so he sold it to me on the cheap. I did have ugly duckling type ideas, where I would rear the rejected creature to become a famous, brave and noble fighting animal, beating the chickens that were chosen over him at a young age, but this romanticism was defeated by a heavy dose of reality when I saw him being attacked by a female (henpecked?). Hence he has been named as “Montro”, a Dominican word that translates as “weakling”. He is currently serving his time as an alarm clock before being served up as a stew.

My ownership of this useless animal has confirmed my status as a useless Gringo. People laugh as they ask me how “the champion cock” is, which then provokes a joking conversation about how Montro will beat their best chicken any day. This often turns into a useful conversation that gives me some nice bits of information for my research. Perhaps I will write an anthropological paper entitled “methodological implications of penile poultry jokes for participant observation in a Latin American setting”. But perhaps I will prefer to keep my Geographer status, and the dignity that accompanies it.

I also have a few hens on order, to provide me with quality eggs, so I shall keep you updated on that.

There have been a number of posts on this blog that mention shocking behaviour in public by Dominicans, particularly the complete obliviousness in public arenas to those around them. Before coming here I would have never imagined that cinema going involved audience participation (why would you want to give advice to an on-screen character?), and my staid Britishness is struggling with the queuing system. Coming from a country where people would rather kill their own mother than suffer the tutting and disapproving glances that result from skipping their place in a queue, it takes some adapting to a place where ones location in the queue is reflective not of the order in which one arrived, but the sharpness of ones elbows and determination to hit people with a handbag in order to save a few seconds getting on a bus. I still struggle to go up to the counter in my local village shop and just shout my order oblivious to the person being served. As I wait patiently for my turn, it is taken by the newly arrived. To my shame, I can’t bring myself to act as the locals do and elbow my way to be served, but as I live behind the corner shop and have a key, I just let myself in the back door, take what I want, and leave the money without having to shout and assert oneself.
This demonstrates two seemingly contradictory aspects of Dominican society. Whilst people are amazingly inconsiderate in their public behaviour, they are at the same time extraordinarily generous in many other ways. Whilst the behaviour of those in queues, cinemas, lectures, roads shows absolutely no regard for those around them, my landlady and village shop owner doesn’t bat an eyelid when I enter and take what I need. Likewise I can’t pass my neighbours house without them coming out into the street to invite me in for coffee and biscuits, if not lunch. I feel very guilty in these situations, knowing what percentage of their daily income this expenditure represents. If it is a family that I have been visiting a lot, I often feign stomach ache because of this guilt. Everyone has been incredibly welcoming, open to telling me all sorts of aspects of their lives, making my work a lot easier and infinitely more enjoyable.
I recently posted a thread on a Dominican affairs forum, in which I asked for help in understanding this inconsiderate-incredibly generous contradiction. In many ways it is the opposite of British behaviour of politeness, giving up ones seat on the bus, yet utter refusal to help strangers, which I suppose could also be seen as a contradiction. It soon became the hottest topic on the board, but none of the 200 plus replies that arrived in the first week helped me understand this contradiction. Most of them denounced all Dominicans as being childlike, and therefore deserving of being either ignored or patronised (patting them on the head and giving them a sweet), or criticising me for being an ex-pat who refused to give up my foreign ways and understand Dominicans – the complete opposite of what I am trying to do. Chiri and some others pointed out that the inconsideration/generosity divide could be likened to a class divide or an urban/rural divide, which have made it more comprehensible, but unfortunately not more tolerable.
Answers from anthropologists on a postcard please.

Continuing a previous thread on the spread of gringoisms, I have come across some new ones. Many of course are the bastardisation of Gringlish words, such as describing 4*4s as yipetas, originating from the word jeep. Likewise, all the hip and very annoying young things constantly say es jevy, derivative of heavy, as a positive adjective. Hence these yipeta driving brats are known as jevitas, which is definitely not a positive description. Indeed this gringoisation extends into all aspects of their lives – one of the places where they drink in Santo Domingo is known as BoBos, which as the neon sign tells us is an abbreviation for Bourgeois Bohemian. With its shiny bar, fancy décor and outrages prices it is certainly one, but not the other. I hate that place and its clientele with a passion, preferring el Sarten next door, a down to earth yet madly vibrant bar that plays old time son music.
Anyway, I recently discovered that el marking tape is a crucial part of cockfighting, as this standard Blue Peter item is used to hold artificial spurs in place on the cock’s leg whilst the wax is drying. Random Gringlish words pop up in the agricultural outposts down the roads, which originate from the agrochemical industry. I passed a small shop that advertised itself as El Store de RoundUpPlus. There is a sense that your business is more reputable if it has a Gringlish word in the title, much like restaurants who think that because their menu is in French then the food tastes better. Hence Betty’s Salon can charge twice the price of Salon de Betty. Bonus points are given for incorrect grammar and spelling, though this afflicts the Spanish signage as well.
This trend also extends into naming for children, as they are often given Gringlish names, particularly ones relating to American presidents, names that have no Spanish origin. In my village there is a Wilson, a Washington, a Jeferson, as well as a Jefrey, a Jon-David. Someone up the road is called Welington, and I was laughing uncontrollably when he was introduced to me, whilst wearing rubber boots. Some things just don’t translate.
How they get these names I still don’t understand. I did hear that a new musical about DominicanYorks (a Gringoised word used to describe the expat population in New York) in which a major character is called Usnavy, after the first sign his parents saw when they arrived in the port of New York. I am still waiting to meet young RoundUpPlus Fernandez.

Chiri has challenged me to tell you five surprising things about me. It has been a troubling editing process reaching these, as I know that many people involved in the more interesting stories read this column, as does my mother. So here are the edited selection, though I am sure I will be reminded of a few missing ones through the comments section.
1. Much to the amusement of my colleagues, I am considered (mainly by myself) to be the world’s fourth most eminent expert in the political aspects of forest fires. As they are quick to point out, there are only four people in the world who look at the political aspects of forest fires. If you are reading this, and know something about the political aspects of forest fires, please alert me and I will adjust my global standings accordingly (i.e. downward).
2. I once spent the best part of a week dressed up as a woman, very badly. In my defence, it was carnival, and most of the time I was suffering from the side effects of tequila. I still don’t understand men (and Cher) who go through to much effort to look like the perfect drag queen, with big hair and corsets. I feel that cross-dressing, like juggling with chainsaws, is much more enjoyable for the spectator if it is done badly. In the case of mixing tequila, cross dressing and flirting, the potential for disaster is much less when the cross dressing is done badly. And the flirting, for that matter.
3. I spent a large part of my teenage years, like many others, lying about my age/name/occupation. I never learnt Groucho Marx’s lesson, that any place that is prepared to let you in during these circumstances is not the type of place that you would want to be in. Apart from underage entrance to bad pubs, I once got a free backstage pass to a minor Spanish music festival by posing as a journalist. Unfortunately the music was so bad that I fell asleep, much to the disdain of the man who gave me the pass.
4. My right leg is almost an inch longer than my left leg. This didn’t cause me to walk round in circles, but my entire upper body has become slightly deformed to accommodate this irregularity. I only found this out when I was getting measured for a kilt and the tailor was wondering why the damn thing looked so bad.
5. I was so accident prone as a child that it is a miracle that I saw my fifth birthday. I had had pneumonia twice by age two, I tipped a bottle of paint stripper down my front on my first birthday, and I had a habit of regularly falling into very cold ponds. In retrospect, social services should have paid my parents a visit. However, apart from that I was a perfectly gorgeous baby, and any comments from my brother about a permanently dripping nose should be ignored.

“Off to the Caribbean eh? What kind of excuse for research is that, sitting on a beach all day?” was a typical comment when I informed people about my plans. Sadly, they couldn’t have been further from the truth.

Unknown to some, the Dominican Republic has some bloomin’ great muckle* mountains, and I live on top of one of them. This particular mountain seems to catch everything the Atlantic can through at it. I am surrounded by what is technically known as montane cloud forest, which means that it is located at precisely the attitude at which moist air coming in from the Atlantic, and forced to rise over the mountains, condenses into semi-permanent rain clouds. Combining this general soggyness with the cold of being at 1200m altitude and it is not that pleasant a place to be. In fact, I would go so far as to say that I would rather have Manchester’s climate. Since I returned here almost two weeks ago from my brief sojourn in sunny Santo Domingo, it has rained for at least 12 hours every day, but nearer 18. That is not a typo.

The quantity and quality of the rain are both impressive. Firstly, it is near permanent, and secondly it ranges in intensity between drizzle that is irritating but relatively harmless to rain that comes down so hard that it stings. Any brief ray of sunshine is just an opportunity to better survey the mud ridden landscape before it is obscured again by dark rainclouds and bucketloads of water falling from the sky. It is truly miserable, worse than Glasgow. The roads have turned into something that reminds me of my time at Glastonbury. One architectural flaw has been revealed in this – all the roofs here are made of corrugated iron. When it rains here, the sound is like a symphony for timpani, a loud and constant crash. I am frequently kept awake at night by the sound of rain on the roof. Of course, that is when I am not woken up shivering by the freezing cold temperatures. It may be in the Caribbean, but it snows in the mountains near here. The lack of sunshine means that the mist chills you to the bone, and I have spent the last week wearing two jumpers, having forgot to bring my winter coat to the Caribbean.

It is truly miserable weather in the Caribbean.

My neighbours are all a bit morose, sitting around because they can’t work. They can’t harvest because the crops rot if collected wet, and they can’t apply fertiliser or such because the rain would wash it away. They can’t go and do other stuff, because that would involve getting wet, and we can’t be having that. It is part decent excuse, and part procrastination technique. And dear reader, it is one in which I am also participating.

(*muckle – particularly braw** Scottish adjective for large)
(**braw – Scottish word for fantastic)

A friend recently made a joke that there is two ways to ensure a business is a success – sell alcohol or give it an English name.

Dominicans share Winston Churchill’s attitude towards drink: in victory they deserve it and in defeat they need it. When times are good they deserve it, but when they are bad they need it.

I can’t think of a way of shoehorning in the other great Churchill quote on alcohol: when a group of teetotal Mormons told him that alcohol stung like a viper and kicked like a mule, he replied that he had been looking all his life for a drink like that. Although I hear that some home made rums here sting like a viper, kick like a mule, and blind like a bat, but that is a story for another day.

People get paid here on a Saturday evening and some people head straight to the corner shop to drink until Monday morning, they run out of money or they fall over, whichever comes first. No matter how bad things are, there is always money for beer. Sometimes they accelerate the wealth redistribution process by betting on cockfights or billiard games to accompany the drinking. The more they drink, the louder they shout, and the louder they have to put the music so that they have an excuse to shout so loud. As I live next to a place with a reputation for boisterous weekend recreation, this does quickly become very grating, particularly as they appear to have one CD consisting of 5 songs, which is endlessly on loop. I have decided that if I am a bad person, I will go to a kind of personalised hell that consists of a bar like that, full of drunken idiots, whilst I am eternally on antibiotics and cannot resort to hard liquor to take the pain away. Hell truly is other people, but some people more than others.

Continuing on from a previous thread about the possibility of armed insurrection in this country, the last few weeks have seen high social tensions and anti-government feeling. Since the New Year, in accordance with International Monetary Fund austerity measures to pay for the monstrous cost of constructing the Santo Domingo metro, the tax on a bottle of beer has increased markedly, so a bottle of beer now costs about 25% more than last month. Of course the men complain more about this than they do about the accompanying reduction in the subsidy for basic goods such as rice, beans and propane. Their wives have a different perspective. Interestingly, the tax hasn’t been applied to rum, perhaps because sugarcane is grown in the DR, but the grain and hops for beer are imported. Suits me fine, as the rum here is good, and the beer at best mediocre.

IMF austerity measures have a nasty history here, as in much of Latin America. Sometimes they do have positive effects on the economy as a whole, but it is almost always the poorest who feel the pinch most, and it often provokes deadly riots, such as the ones in the late 80’s that were a key factor in toppling a government.

The subject of English names will have to wait, but ask me sometime about my neighbour’s rubber boots.

I recently read a magazine article that stated that an armed insurrection could never happen in the US, despite a distressingly high gun ownership. The argument is that people have got so complacent that all they would do if there was a oppressive and morally corrupt government would be to update their blogs.

[insert comment about how the current US government is oppressive and morally corrupt]

Here in the rural DR, the key factor is not complacency and blogs, but simplicity and chickens. I was having a chat with one of my neighbours recently, who informed me that she always voted Reformista because when it was in power in the late nineties, they gave her a chicken. She said "I always vote reformista because they are the only party that did anything for me. They once gave me a chicken." The president at the time was Balaguer, a man who made Machiavelli's prince look like Dubya. He knew fine that he could buy people's votes not with electrification schemes and improving the education system and hospitals, but with simple handouts to poor rural farmers. They saw the representatives of this man come to their village, and give them a chicken that they said was the personal gift of the president. In return, the villagers forgot all his violent repression and vote rigging, and committed themselves to a lifetime of voting Reformista, simply because of a chicken. One fears for democracy if the price of tolerating a fairly repressive quasi-dictatorship is a few chickens.

Of course, the other political parties have learnt from this. In the village, electicity was installed the day immediately before the presidential election. At the last election parties of all colours were seen handing out basic household goods (i.e. bags of rice and packets of beans) from pick-up trucks decked out in party colours. Every Dominican owns at least three baseball hats with a political slogan, though they are quick to say "it is for the shade only", rather than indicating any allegiance. If you want to find out what party they voted for, you are better off looking at the colour of their chickens.

In case you were wondering what an overcrowded motoconcho looks like, here is a standard picture of a family day out, from the from page of today's Listin Diario. The first line of the article says "the growth of motoconcho use has been as massive as it is dangerous". This is truly a typical DR scene.

Possibly my favourite place in Santo Domingo to take a wee stroll is El conde. It is a pedestrianised street that contains no great historical monuments, just boring shops, but its attraction lies in the unlimited people watching opportunities.

At one end is Paco's, a cheap restaurant with pavement tables which is a prime location for fat sweaty pink old foreign boars to meet their twenty year old Dominican 'girlfriends' and show them off to all the other old farts. Occaisionally you see them also walking down the Conde hand in hand, but they perspire and waddle, and find this a tiring exercise, preferring to save their energy for other activities.

A little further down is a games arcades, where the young folk hang out. Upstairs is a pool hall full of hustlers, but downstairs is where the real action is. Near the door is one of those great dance arcade games, where the player has to put their feet on certain areas of the dance floor depending on the symbols on the screen of the arcade, and to pass each level, the dancer must reach a certain score based on their timing and accuracy. There are two dancefloors to one arcade, so that two people can dance at the same time can compete. The guys who do this, and they are all teenage boys, see this as a form of gladiatorial combat, and they are very, very good. They always select the hardest level, and have clearly spent all their pocketmoney on the game to get the practice. At the hardest levels the music is fast, the symbols on the screen turn to a blur, and the feet move like an epilectic centipede on amphetamines. How they manage to stay on it for one minute, let alone pass level after level, is beyond me. A crowd of girls and other guys come to watch, eyeing up each other and the competition. The dancers clearly put a lot of effort into it, and perspire heavily. Most of the time they are stripped to the waist, which makes a certain sub-sect of the species that occupies Paco's rather excited. The combination of sweat, testosterone, teenage hormones and bad dance music reminds me of my school discos, and I quickly move on.

El Conde is also the prime place for the selling of tourist tat, and those guys persistantly pester me to buy their coconuts carved into comical monkeys, or bad pseudo-nativist Haitian paintings. However, today I had a far more irritating experience, one that made me take the nearest side street as an escape route. There are speakers on the street, and often in the evening they play soothing classical music, making for a nice stroll. Today, it being Christmas time, they decided to play the music of Sir Cliff Richard.

Ye gods, I fear for the children.

I have just got back from spending a week in San Francisco, visiting la novia who was visiting her week-old nephew with the rest of family in tow. A great time was had by all of course, in a great city with some wonderful people, but now I am back in the surreal reality of fieldwork (although I understand that a visit to California is not the same as a visit to reality).

The reason that I like San Francisco is that the city, and parts of the suburbs, were designed for two feet, and this makes it very different from the average US city. It also makes a bit of a change from Santo Domingo, whose recent city design (as with everything else) is too busy looking at the US for inspiration rather than at what works. Hence rather than designing centrapetally, creating spaces for interaction, where retail, leisure and business spaces interact, they are just whacking sub-urban and sub-standard shopping centres up everwhere, and making it impossible to walk anywhere. The Foucault in me says this is a power exercise of the yipeta'd classes over the publico classes, excluding them from their spaces, but I often tell the Foucault in me to shut up.

Now, I am a big fan of Jane Jacobs (the Canadian, not the Australian). I believe that cities should be communities, and that designing around the car is the wrong thing to do. Perhaps that is why I like the colonial zone so much. It was a bold new project, and is distinctly different from its early 16th century contemporaries in Spain. Rather than having small side streets coming off the main street, the colonial zone has almost equally sized broad boulevards, set out in straight lines. This is clearly a space for interaction, rather than excluding the poor to the side streets.
It was also so the rich could drive their carriages everywhere, predicting events five centuries into the future.

My thoughts on this were provoked by a strange sight today, or rather, the absense of one. Normally the pavements around Parque Independencia are overflowing with people selling fruit, flowers, books and other assorted items. I often pick up some pineapple on my way around, exchanging money and pleasantries with the storekeepers. Today the pavements were empty, and had a post-apocalyptic air to them. The park had a completely different character, partly the result of the fact that you could walk along the pavement without being forced into the road by a pile of bananas. Having asked around, it seems that the town council has banned people from selling things from the pavement, as part of their plan to "clean up" Santo Domingo. In other words, make it like a US city, with no street vendors. This annoys me, as not only does it remove my source of cheap fruit, but also the street level social interaction that makes the colonial zone much more "alive" than the more sterile places in the middle class suburbs. Maybe the people who make these decisions don't want to interact with other people. Santo Domingo folk are pathologically inconsiderate to the feelings of others (witness their behaviour in public events), and their selfishness is creating an urban landscape that is selfish, devoid of character, unlovable and unlivable.