Dominican - here I come... errr... was

My posting has been conspicuously absent lately, but I blame at least part of that on my trip to the Dominican. Not to mention the exams preceeding it and the exam studying preceeding that and the crazy amount of work done on the admissions video previous to that. So with that summary of the last month thrown at you, I'll return to the more interesting portion - Dominican.

Along with 29 classmates and two friends of classmates, I headed down to San Juan, Dominican Republic for a week during our March break. Here we are:















If nothing else, this attests to how close our class really has become - the group that went is by no means representative of one particular clique from within the class. From its humble beginnings as a few people from the class talking about heading south for the break, it snowballed into the group you see above. Somewhere along the way, my friend Matt convinced me that I had to come, since we could play tennis every day. Which we almost did. And so I was hauled on board.

Most of my week was pretty relaxing - laying on the beach, reading, playing cards, swimming, etc. In fact, I polished off the back half of the Narnia series and read a third of The Iliad (I ran out of reading material and it was what available for borrowing). As well, I nurtured my crotchety old man side by playing copious amounts of bridge. That's right. I can admit that I like bridge. A couple of attempts at windsurfing, at which I actually made some progress (Jonathan take note) rounded out the majority of my activities for the week.

I did partake in one day trip, a catamaran voyage to go snorkelling at two different reefs. It was an amazing day. Other than the 7am departure time, it was a near perfect day. The weather was, along with pretty much the entire week, perfect. Hot, sunny, barely a cloud in the sky. The crew that ran the boat was great, entertaining enough on their own to make for a great day. The variety of fish and coral in the reefs was amazing, and I remembered how much fun I had snorkelling in Florida with my family a number of years ago. We sailed back under sail power, and saw a group of whales, and I'm pretty sure I caught a glimpse of a dolphin at one point. To boot, I won a bottle of rum in a cannonball contest. How did skinny man Art Winter win a cannonball contest you ask? Well, my years of experience in my home pool has taught me that a cannonball contest is won on technique, and that technique is the canopener (or jacknife) whose splash is so much more impressive than a cannonball can ever be.

I could throw in a few other stories - a 3 hour game of pool basketball that slowly degraded into "kill the guy with the ball," many late nights singing karaoke (either in the karaoke bar there or just on our own), generally making a ruckus as a large group of people, and so on. But I'll leave you with a couple shots of the scenery as I remember when I could wear shorts last week...