Vacations and stuff

I have successfully completed another semester. It's been an eventful couple of months. 

My family came to visit during April. My brother and I were planning a vacation to Puerto Plata (on the north end of the island) and my parents were planning on going on a mission trip to the same place at the same time. It was serendipitous! We had a really good time and met a lot of really neat people, including Gerard Butler and Anderson Cooper look a likes, people from the same town where Trailer Park Boys was filmed, and some cool people we wrote a movie script with. Now the only member of the family left to come for a visit is Daniel. 

As in true Cunningham family tradition, we got into a couple adventures. Kristian and I were staying at a resort. At check-in they told us that if we lost our wristbands it would cost $100 to replace them. I stupidly thought to myself, "Who would lose their wrist band?" That same night there was a really fun welcome party on the beach. On the way back, instead of waiting for the shuttle, we decided to walk the short distance back to our room. The resort was hard to navigate and we got lost. We could see where we wanted to go, but it was a long way around to get there. All we had to do was run across a field and jump a wall. We that's exactly what we did...right into someone's villa. We got almost back to the room and I realized that I had lost my wristband. Long story short, we bribed a guard with food to let us look behind the villa as long as we promised not jump the wall again. A short time later, Kristian came back with my broken wristband, after hopping the fence back into the villa. Just glad we didn't get caught and kicked out on our first night.

Then we almost missed the last bus back to Santo Domingo. In this country, they take Catholic holidays very seriously. We decided we would leave at 4pm on Good Friday, but decided to leave at 2 instead. We got to the bus station a little early to find that the ticket office was closed and wasn't reopening until the next day. Kristian and I had no idea what to do. I tried calling some people who had relatives nearby to see if they could house us for the night. As I was making calls a bus rolls up. I quickly went to talk to the driver and asked if we could either pay him for the ticket or pay in Santo Domingo. He let us on, and we were back on our way.

Standing about 1 foot from death on a cliff in Puerto Plata.

This semester I have a really bad schedule, but my teachers are all really good (a nice change) and I am already learning a lot. Unfortunately, I have two Saturday classes this semester, but I think that will keep me more on track. I am pretty motivated at this point (1 week into the semester) to study.