Why Dominicus and Why Did We Start This Blog?
For Part One Click Here: How Did We End Up Here?
Why the Dominican Republic?
In the last blog, I talked about rage buying tickets to get out of America, but why the Dominican Republic? Ben had actually been to the DR 5 times prior to this and he’s fluent, not only in Spanish, but in Dominican Spanish (the islands basically have their own dialect.) I didn’t speak any Spanish and I had never been here before. This place and this language was such a huge part of Ben’s life and it felt so sad to me that I knew nothing about it even after being together for almost 5 years. When we decided to leave the states, coming here was a no-brainer. I am also ocean obsessed. I always have been. Living near the ocean was a huge dream of mine so this easily checked that box as well.
Why Dominicus?
If you google Dominicus you will find… almost nothing, so how did we und up here? Honestly, intuition and luck; it’s how we end up most places. Ben had spent most of his time here in La Romana. La Romana is the closest large city. He did a college internship there and lived with a local family for about a month and a half. La Romana is large and loud and busy and, in the parts that Ben lived in, dangerous. He knew he didn’t want to move his family there. We’re not city people and we wanted some place safe for our two year old. Ben started searching AirBnB and found some places in the Bayahibe Dominicus area. He didn’t know Dominicus but he had been to Bayahibe and he knew this was a safe area.
The apartment was beautiful and close to the beach and we were only 30 minutes from La Romana so we could still see the people and places that he knew. We booked it, site unseen, for 3 months. It was a risk, but we’re business owners, we’re used to calculated risks. I have no problem moving somewhere I’ve never been. We follow our gut and it works for us.
Why Did We Start This Blog?
After we booked the apartment I started googling the area, trying to scope it out and get a feel for what life was going to be like in the next few months. There was a frustrating lack of info. The businesses here don’t have websites. People don’t use the correct names of things. Locations are wrong on google maps and even the google maps satellite image is fuzzy here.
We love coffee more than almost anything. When we were in the states, we spent most of our time either looking for coffee shops or actually sitting in coffee shops. When I started to search out this area online after we booked our apartment I remember telling Ben that there were no coffeeshops in the area, in fact, there was nothing between our apartment and La Romana. We were pretty disappointed.
When we arrived here and started exploring, we found out that there were at least 5 places we could get really good coffee within walking distance and countless more with a 5-10 minute scooter ride. This area almost doesn’t exist on the internet, and it makes it difficult to navigate.
We are web designers and digital entrepreneurs, so we know how to run a business on the internet. We want to help you have the information that we didn’t because this move would have been nearly impossible without Ben being fluent in Dominican Spanish. We have spent a lot of time talking to people and wandering around just trying places. There’s no info about this area, and this is one of the best places we’ve ever been. So we decided to start this blog. We will be talking about our experiences here, places we love, and how to navigate the culture. All the blogs about specific places will have google maps and pictures to help you find them. We will include links to their websites or google pages for the places that actually have them. We want to give you as much info as possible as well as sharing our experience. We hope to see you soon.
