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.