Friday we took a bus 4 hours back to Santo Domingo. We spent the day on Saturday walking around old town and along the boardwalk. We saw an old fort, the lighthouse, and cathedral and plaza and the home that Columbus had built but never lived in. His son Diego lived there with his own family after Columbus died. Then this morning, John got up and went to the airport at 5am. Jessi and I slept a little while longer, had breakfast and then met up with Ariel, who had spent the night with a friend of his, and hopped back on the bus for the ride back to Puerto Plata. Now the vacation is over. No more condo, no more air conditioning, no hot water, no more 24 hours of electricity, back to cooking our own food, no swimming pool and laying and watching the ocean endlessly. Tomorrow Jessi has to head back to work and I will go along with her. She said that this week we will be doing weights and measures on all the kids in the school. If we get that done, then I will help Candace with the Christmas letters to the kid's sponsors.

OK, so just as I was listing off the things I will be giving up...the power went out!!! That was at 5pm...it is 10pm now...good thing her laptop has a backup battery...I saved it and now it is time to post it before we lose power again.

After the power went off, we just sat around talking for a while, then Jessi and I got ready for the evening service at church. I've never put makeup on by candle light before. A lot of the places here had lights even though we didn't. Jessi told me that they have inverters. The church has one too. Maybe you know what that is, I didn't, I thought maybe it was like a generator. I was wrong. It is a battery-like thing that takes over when the power goes out. It is not noisy at all like a generator is and does not use fuel. It sits there charged and ready to go automatically when needed. After church, we picked up some dinner (dinner at 9pm?) at a place on the way home and came back here to her apartment to eat it by candle light. Eating dinner by candle light has a whole different meaning to everyone down here! So then Jessi and I decided it was time to get in bed under her mosquito net because the bugs were beginning to strike. We had just gotten all comfy and situated and started reading our books by flashlight when, wouldn't you know it, they power came back on! So she told me to get out here and finish this up before it was lost. So now it is time to get back under that net and get to sleep! Buenas Noches!