Local cuisine
After a long day of classes, the one thing I look forward to most is delicious Dominican food. Meals here are not that fundamentally different from meals in America. People eat three meals a day- breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Everyday I eat breakfast at the hotel. They serve pancakes or french toast depending on the day, sausages, mashed plantains, scrambled eggs, assorted bread, muffins, croissants, pineapples, cantaloupes, and papaya. I usually eat bread with peanut butter, a muffin, a chocolate croissant, and eggs.
One thing about meals that is different here is that when you go to a restaurant, the portion sizes are much smaller than in America. In America, if you go to a restaurant, they tend to serve you more food than you could reasonably expect to eat in one sitting. Here in the Dominican Republic, the serving sizes are not too big and not too small.
For lunch, in between classes, several of us go to a local cafeteria-style restaurant that serves rice, beans, chicken, pork, and vegetables. I get rice, beans, and chicken for about $4, and my vegetarian friends get rice, beans, and vegetables for about $3. It is a great deal.
One of my favorite dinner places is a local place that sells empanadas. An empanada is a fried dumpling with savory ingredients on the inside. My favorite one has eggplant, cheese, and salsa, but I also like the chicken and vegetables empanada, and my friends have raved about the zucchini empanada. The best part is, each empanada is only around $1 and I usually only get two or three of them.
There is also a great restaurant in the area that makes excellent and affordable falafel. I like to get the eggplant falafel (I love eggplant) and it is great, especially with their homemade hot sauce.
The basis of the typical Dominican meal, I have noticed is: rice, beans, some kind of meat like beef or chicken, and baked vegetables. I really like it, although sometimes it gets a bit old. That’s why places like the empanada and falafel restaurants are so great!
Also, I have an update to my last post about transportation! This weekend, we traveled to Santiago, a city about 2 hours away from Santo Domingo. As part of the trip, we had to ride in public cars several times. It was really a lot of fun, and there’s nothing like them in the US. They’re like a combination of a taxi and an Uber pool. You wave one down on the side of the road, and you tell the driver where you want to get off. But here’s the fun part: it can hold up to 6 passengers squeezed together, and therefore chances are you will be riding with someone you do not know! It was an intimidating but exciting experience.
