I have been seriously neglecting my blog because I haven’t had a whole lot to say lately. Other than the whole vacation thing, the last few weeks have been fairly uneventful.

The vacation was amazing. If the pictures weren’t so damn huge, and I wasn’t too lazy to re-size them, I would post a few. Instead, I’ll probably put them on flickr or shutterfly. I’ll post the URL as soon as I get around to it.

Our days consisted of sitting on the beach from around 8 AM until 10 or 1030, when the bars opened. At that time, I would generally move to the pool. My cadaverous skin can’t really handle unobstructed tropical sun after 1030 or 11 in the morning anyway. The pool had palm trees all around it, so there was shade to be had. Plus, there was a small eave over the swimup bar. Being an all-inclusive resort, I spent a LOT of time at the swimup bar. Well, the swimup bar, and the central bar, and the minibar in the room, and the beachside bar. I like bars. I REALLY like free bars. All of the bartenders and staff were ubernice, and most of them spoke enough English to know I didn’t want another damn rum and coke with a fucking lime in it. Most of them. The rest of the time, I had to either hope they heard me say “Sin limon”, or pick the lime out of the drink myself. Between the sun, the saltwater, the alcohol, and the lime juice, I was rather dried out by the end of the week. Oh yeah, and the other thing that dried me out was the non-stop diarrhea and vomiting I had to endure from about 10 PM Friday night until shortly before we boarded the bus to the airport at 9:30 Saturday morning. Even then, the diarrhea persisted until Monday or Tuesday. I’m fairly sure it had a lot more to do with something I ate than the massive amounts of shitty rum I ingested over the week.

Some of the funnier highlights of the vacation:
- The race around the pool and one of the employees pulling the contestants out of the pool by their pants, then holding on to their pants while they did push-ups to pull them up.

- The nice large Polish man who wanted me to sleep with his girlfriend. He was about 6′4″ and drinking vodka straight out of a glass with no ice. I respectfully declined.

- The Dominican staff members, who were all incredible dancers, forcing white people to attempt to dance like them. The only thing worse than a white American dancing is a white Frenchman dancing.

- Someone actually believing that I own a bar. A rather popular, franchised bar that will remain unnamed.

- While attempting to carry on a conversation with a guy from France, whose English was rather broken, I got frustrated at my inability to communicate what I wanted to say, and I said “Shit!”. The Frenchman then said, “OH, shit! I know shit! Everyone knows shit!” Good to see that vulgarity can build a bridge between cultures.

- We went on a snorkeling trip one day. The boat ride to the site was about 25 minutes, and our boat driver was about 19 years old and didn’t speak a lick of English. They told us to bring bread and bananas to attract the fish, which worked quite well. The boat driver brought some bread as well. While everyone was out snorkeling, the driver was pegging people in the back and the head with little balls of bread. I don’t remember the last time I saw someone laugh so hard at themselves. He got an absolute kick out of it.

Severe traveler’s sickness aside, it really was a great trip. I don’t remember ever being so relaxed. Usually when I take time off of work, I’m worried about what’s going wrong the whole time. I didn’t really think about it at all this time until Monday, the day before I had to go back. I resolve to take a week off every year from now on, and get the hell out of town during that week. I’ve taken three days off before, but usually I get trapped in town and it really doesn’t feel like a vacation. I doubt that I’ll be able to afford an all-inclusive resort in the Dominican Republic on my rather paltry salary, but I’m sure I’ll be able to figure something out.