Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.

After being in Bolivia and Argentina, the Dominican Republic was my entrance to the so well known "Caribbean". Countries as the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Puerto Rico (which I also visited later) are icons when it is about talking about the caribbean, and to have the opportunity to visit at least two of them (Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico), was simply like a dream, even if I knew that I would not have much time for the "hard core" tourism that such beautiful places offer.

I arrived from Buenos Aires to Santo Dominog and jumped straight into a National Leadership Development Seminar of AIESEC in the Dominican Republic. It was in a small town called San Jose de Ocoa, in a very small hotel, where (similar as in the whole country) we were facing energy/electricity issues all the time, what made it a bit crazy to depend on the beamer to deliver sessions! Electricity used to went off exactly in the middle of sessions, you could never expect it to go or to come back at a certain time ... so it was hardly posible to plan.

Anyways, they always figured out a way to manage the whole thing. So for sure lots, but lots of flexiblity and patience were the first lessons in this country.
Something very unexpected, but extremely nice that I had the opportunity to also come bit close in the Dominican Republic, but specially in this conference, was a group of young people of HAITI. As many of you might know HAITI and the Dominican Republic are neighbour countries (they basically share an island) and recently there have been tough disturbs between these two countries, and well in Haiti itself. There is no AIESEC in Haiti. On of the Local Committees in the Dominican Republic (AIESEC in Santiago de los Caballeros) has membership that is from Haiti (haitians studying in Santiago) so even if as AIESECers from the DOminican Republic, they made a cultural presentation about their country, which even if short, was very motivational. It was so cool hearing them to speak in their native language ... and see how (even if they speak very good spanish), they still have these particular accent. When I just arrived to the conference (actually I missed the opening plenary, so I did not know they where from Haiti) and heard them speaking for teh first time, I was so confused trying to find out what language that was - at some point I even got so scared that I was too tired or stressed from the trip that I could not understand spanish anymore ... Hehehe, I felt so chilled when I realized that they were haitians (then phisically you could assume they are dominicans).

After two country visits of relative bad eating (mainly because of being sick and stress management reasons) the arrival in Domi was the start of a very "greasy" food routine. In the Dominican Republic people eat a lot of fast food, that comes from transnationals (Mc Donalds, Burgenr King, etc ...), as well that are local and more informal! Piccolo, was for example of these local, cheap, but still good for the price places in the district where I was staying ... Chimichurri (better known as "chimi"), which is sort of a hamburger, but done with a thiner and very strange meet (reddish, in Colombia we would say it looks like "cat meet"- hehehe), seems to be the speciality.