Retreat to the Dominican Republic

The weather in Toronto hadn’t even settled below zero yet, but already weeks of sitting alone in my apartment and pacing restlessly from coffee shop to coffee shop in my neighborhood, trying to write, were giving me cabin fever. All work and no play makes Pipes a dull girl.

I had to get away; away from my too-familiar city, away from the barking dog in the apartment downstairs, away from my darling partner whose comings and goings to the daily grind of his office reminded me of the routine, society and paycheck I’d abandoned. I needed to know: would writing be easier if I changed settings? If I removed the temptations of cooking, cleaning and reliable Internet?
Just like that, I bought a cheap flight to the Dominican.

The salt air blowing off the sea is soft and moist, impregnating the paper of the books I brought along, bending the pages into curvy waves. By noon, everything looks like it has been dropped in a bathtub, including me.

My body, unprepared for a sudden thirty degree change in weather, is sweating like a bucket that has sprung multiple leaks. My hat, shirt and shorts are soaked in a potent stew of sunscreen, bug spray and intermittent rain.

Hours of grinding my teeth over downtown noise pollution seem hilarious now. I should know better; planet earth is noisy by nature. You can’t travel expecting silence, just a change of audio scenery.

Leaving behind the week-long fire alarm testing in my condo, I now have the operatic yawps of tree frogs in the bamboo outside my mesh-screened bedroom window. Instead of wailing sirens I have the roar and bellow of tropical storms, rain pounding on the metal roof, winds howling through the palms. In place of the high-pitched yapping of a toy canine, there are the mournful caterwauls and angry hissing of feral felines, and the distant boom of Latin beats from trucks parked on the beach.

On my first night, I lay awake, not so much from the new sounds I could hear, but straining for one that was missing. Staring up at the gauzy curtain of the mosquito net I’d brought from home, I waited for the tell-tale bzzz alerting me to the fact that I was about to donate blood without consent. I heard nothing.

My bug fear approaches the levels of paranoia that some people have about zombies, nuns, or republicans. I can’t help myself, the little bastards terrify me. But the beach is not the jungle, and armed with an extremely liberal coating of DEET (I spray my legs and feet so vigorously that they look shellacked – my toenail polish has melted off in several places from the chemicals) I have so far managed less than 10 itchy bites, all on my legs. We’ll see how I fare over the next 10 days.

There are, of course, other bugs. This is the tropics; living things of all shapes and sizes thrive in a hot, damp climate. Unseen but distantly present are the creatures of nightmare: tarantulas, cockroaches, millipedes. Ever present but equally invisible are minute sand fleas, midges and ants so incredibly wee that you could easily mistake one for an eyelash or a speck of dirt until you see them moving.

While not as small as the head of a pin, Dominican ants are smaller than the head of a pen, and move easily under and over my laptop keys looking for who knows what. Miniscule vultures of the bug world, they collect trash and keep things tidy. In a real-life Invasion of the Body Snatchers, I’d killed the one mosquito I found and left its tiny carcass on my desk, as a warning to other winged marauders. Within twenty minutes it had vanished, carried away like Gulliver by the Lilliputians.

Beauty is extravagant here. Lizards and geckos repose on shady branches and sun themselves on red tiles. Hummingbirds sip from hibiscus blooms. Carved wooden parrots look out at trees rustling with yellow-bellied Bananaquits and the abundant brown-and-cream streaked Palm Chats, beaks chattering, feathers fluttering.

Gardening in the Dominican is not the delicate activity of care and preservation that it is in Canada. Back home the tools of the trade are greenhouses, watering cans, fertilizers, shovels and hand-held pruning shears. In the tropics it boils down to two essentials: the machete and the rake. First you chop back, then you clear the debris.

Plants I know only as indoor exotics grow in the open air here, and seem to have been fed magic growth serum. Avocados are massive, the size of a child’s head, falling with a heavy thud from roadside trees. Coconuts abound, and I’ve been warned not to fall asleep under any shady fronds in case a ripe husk succumbs to gravity and plummets to earth, delivering a fatal conk to my head. At the market, fat plantains and jumbo papayas sit on the shelf next to massive jugs of vanilla extract, green and brown bottles of cerveza and fragrant bags of rich, cheap coffee.

Eating has been entertaining. I’ve tried the traditional meal known as La Bandera (“The Flag”), which is a simple, inexpensive and tasty dish of rice, beans and meat. Yesterday I had a bony but delicious goat stew with arroz (rice). My first night, on a gourmet splurge, I had coconut shrimp with Cuban appetizers full of taro and plantain at a patio on the beach. I’ve enjoyed the local beers, Presidente and Bohemia.

Tonight I hope to taste the local wine. There is only one; grapes aren’t a big crop on this island. Made in Puerta Plata, it’s a light red – just 8% alcohol, but the packaging is pure genius.

Here is my description of the label: A smiling bodybuilder with a physique like the Incredible Hulk and a face like David Hasslehoff flexes his muscles in front of a violently yellow background. Below, a slender purple band insists that this is not actually liquid steroids, but in fact, red wine or “vino tinto”. At the bottom, a bright red band tells us the macho brand of this honest brew: La Fuerza! This translates to “The Force”, suggesting that drinking enough of this stuff will help you perform Jedi mind tricks.

Despite the compelling name, I strongly suspect that this will not be the wine I am looking for, and that I will move along, shortly after my first sip.

Hasta luego, Pipes.

I Blame PopCap

For those of you who got really sick of seeing the booties in my last post getting dusty in my blog, and are mad at me for not writing anything about my recent trip to PAX East in Boston, or the purchase of my new condo in the St. Lawrence Market area, or any other little personal things I may have been up to lately, all I can say is: BLAME POPCAP.

My life has been brutally annexed by the game Plants vs Zombies lately. It’s a simple little tower defense game – zombies are attacking your back yard (or roof, or pool), and you have to garden quickly to stop their brain-eating rampage from invading your home. I can’t explain to you why it’s so addictive, it simply is. For those of you who have had hours or days of your free time swallowed whole by the devastation of some of PopCap’s other delectable goodies, such as Bejeweled or Peggle, I hope you understand my predicament. On the plus side, it goaded me into making a nice container garden on my balcony (see above) in case of zombie attack on Yorkville. You never know.

Now that I’ve taken pains to explain why I’ve been such a naughty blogger lately, let me try and make amends.

First, the day to day minutiae. After making a companion stuffed fleece and terry cloth toy dragon (named Lloyd, see above) to follow up on the triumph of my stuffed knitted Linux penguin (Grumpy), I am taking a break from toy making for a while and focusing on finishing my green triangle quilt (also see above). Desperately avoiding the desire to embroider tiny plants and zombies onto it. Knitting a pink version of Ysolda Teague’s Cloud Bolero, and am already off my stitch count (I hate yarn overs!). Reading a bunch of things – just finished a whack of obscure Agatha Christie (The Clocks, The Listerdale Mystery), and am working on re-reading Bird by Bird, Committed by Elizabeth Gilbert (on loan from MintyNinja), and a tentative start on Terry Pratchett’s massive Discworld series, The Colour of Magic, which has been aggressively marketed to me over the years by a series of maniacal fans, including Edwud, Philip and David.

Next, Travel. Pro Tip: if you are flying to Boston from Toronto, take Porter airlines, their service is AMAZING and their marketing is killer, and on top of all that, if you have a mobile phone with Foursquare and you check in at “Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport Ferry” while traveling the 400 meters to get to the Toronto Island Airport, you unlock the “On a Boat” badge. Wicked.

Boston was lovely. Darren and I decided two PAXes in one year was a bit too much, so avoided most of the heavy nerdery to do some sightseeing and sampling of the local restaurants with my friends HA and BW. Things I did enjoy at the con were the retro gaming room, which had a library of classic NES, SNES, Colecovision and Sega games, and the ancient but beautifully preserved systems to play them on. Right next door was the classic arcade room, where you could play free pinball to your heart’s content. I had a go at Dragon’s Lair and a completely bizarre Japanese game where you play pigs with dart guns being attacked by floating foxes held up by balloons (no, seriously) called… Pooyan. *snicker*

In Boston itself, we tried both ways of getting from Logan International Airport to Hynes Convention Centre. Another Pro Tip: don’t bother with the new “Silver” line. It sucks. It’s not even a subway, it’s just a bus that runs underground for a while, then gets insanely crowded, then lets you off at your terminal. Seriously, just take the shuttle to the Blue line, then transfer to Green. It’s WAY faster! We walked the whole Freedom Trail, starting at the Boston Common and going all the way to the USS Constitution. This was my second time walking it and it was every bit as amazing as the first time I did it. Also, the stupid crazy scary rusty see-through bridge between Copp’s Hill and Bunker Hill was still scary as hell, but I crossed it without plunging to my death, so that was okay.

Food-wise, the best place we ate, hands down, was the Parish Cafe on Boylston. Gourmet sandwiches from local celeb chefs all over Boston. Every bite was fabulous, nice patio, and a handsome wooden bar. Emma’s Pizza in Cambridge ran a close second for tasty, with great ambience, nice wine, and thin crust pizza that I could have kept eating all night. The rest of our noms were found on Newbury Street, including TeaLuxe which provided us with some powerful chai and matcha action.

I won’t bother writing about the new condo purchase, since we don’t get the keys until next Monday, and it won’t be much to look at for a while after that, since we need to renovate the bathrooms and kitchen, paint, buy furniture and move in. Hoping to get all this done before the G20 arrives in Toronto in late June.