home for the holidays

i returned yesterday from a week in the dominican republic with my friend nicky. for those of you that are counting, this makes three vacations in four years for the two of us. panama in 2002, cancun in 2003, and punta cana in 2005. we won't speak of 2004 (a.k.a. the year that i couldn't get the time off work and nicky went to costa rica without me and spent a week in a villa with a private pool).

after the absolute insanity that was our last trip in cancun, this one was pretty tame. lots of sun, sand and surf. oh, and just a hint of food poisoning (for me). it wasn't too bad, it basically just left me unable to eat for 4 days. not a bad thing when you are living in a bikini...

we didn't make too many new friends (since about 95% of the people there spoke either german, french or spanish), but we managed to have a lot of fairly creepy guys hit on us. like the 60-year old man who wanted to go dancing with us, promising us he had "moves that would make a snake go crazy". (we had endless giggling fits trying to envision that one.) or the guy who made sure we knew that we understood that he was black by showing us a picture on his cellphone of him with no shirt on, as if saying "negro" will pointing to his arm was too difficult for us canadians to figure out (nicky thinks we were supposed to scroll down. eww.).

i obviously have a million pictures (as well as some video!) and accompanying stories, but who really cares about other peoples vacations, right? coming back to our insanely dry cold climate isn't super fun but i'm still very happy to be home. to ease my pain, i have a brand new pair of cute winter boots and another 2 weeks of vacation to look forward to. life is good.

edit: on second thought, this photo of nicky is too priceless to keep to myself. note the passerby's amazed (disgusted?) expression in the background.