Yoga Day

So this morning started off pretty normal. Got up, had a little bit of breakfast, chatted with my Mom and Don; then went down to see my mom's chickens. Yes, there is now a whole chicken roost in the back yard with 7 chickens. The one in the picture with my mom is named Blanco. She's one of the older chickens, most of the others are pretty much still just chicks. I also went around and took a few pictures of new additions to the main house here, for the people who have seen the pictures from before. There's both a completely new dining room which is very nice, and an addition onto a little sitting area facing the mountains.






If you want to see all the pictures you can head over here: http://picasaweb.google.com/gotschallrw/DR08


I'm planning on adding more pictures to this album as the week progresses. I'll proabably wait until I get home to add them to my facebook album as well.

Then we headed out for my first yoga class. Wow, was that tough. I don't think I've ever stretched my arms and legs out into ways that I've even imagined possible before. It really turned out to be quite a workout. The session ended with my mom and I doing head stands, as you can see. Scott made a solid attempt, but just couldn't quite make it.

After the class, the group headed over to the bungalow in the village for some delicious bagels that I had brought with me. Apparantly, bagels are not something found commonly -- or at all -- here in the Dominican Republic so they had been greatly anticipated.

The plan was for after our bagel breakfast, we'd head to the beach. Of course, things cannot be that simple. On the way to one of the beaches, all of a sudden the car jerks to a stop. We can't go forward or backward. I get out to see what's going on and the muffler of the car had broken in half and each half was sticking into the dirt road. We couldn't move the car without digging one part or the other deeper into the road, and then of course it started downpouring. Eventually a motorbike driver stopped by to help, he managed to get the back part of the muffler off, and the front part tied up enough that it wasn't dragging in the street. Of course, he had a friend just in town that could fix it all up for us in half an hour. An hour and a half -- and lots of soldering -- later we were finally ready to start heading back to the beach.


Finally, I get a chance to just lay out and relax on the beach. And I did. For hours. And it was wonderful. Eventually though, we stopped home, cleaned up, and headed back into town for dinner at Pizza Coco. It felt like it had been forever since i'd had pizza, and boy was I hungry. After dinner came home, watched some episodes of "Wonderfalls" with my brother and brings us to now.