a picture's WORTH a thousand words or WITH a thousand words?

[me and you, you and mee, both of us togetherrrrrr!]

[our stake put on a special dance night for us so we could learn bachata, merengue, and salsa. it was so much fun! and of course i was spinning all over the place trying my best to be that salsa dancing emoji lady.]

[this guy was one of the many hipster guys sitting down and acting too cool to dance. i started talking with all of them and asked them why they weren't dancing and they nominated this guy to dance the next dance with me, even though he was shaking his head no and laughing and saying he was no good. well you better believe when the next song came on, i danced to the empty dance floor and pointed right at him until he came up with me. everybody there was clapping and yelling! it was so funny! we even threw a few crowd pleasing twirls in there to seal the deal.]

[with our cute new friend dariana after she talked in church]

[all of our fun new member friends from the stake dance! half the night was filled with picture taking of course. and yes, all the dominicans have amazing skin and i want to know their secret.]

[jelina and i looking off in the sunset at sosua and talking about how we never want to go back to cold utah winters.]

[angel trying to show off his muscles and me showing off my good side]

[result of what happens when the wifi is out for long periods of time and it's monsooning]

[result of what happens when the sun fries your brain. it got him to stop being all nutso for a second though! but now he grabs my hair every class and tries to recreate this moment soooooo i'd say negative points for miss michelle.]

[the joey tribbiani special. actually, this is the result of what happens when the program director comes to visit and orders pizza for the whole group and you're sitting in the prime eating spot.]

[result of what happens when your neighbor has little piglets which just so happens to be your spirit animal. i picked that baby up and we both just squealed and snorted our heads off!]

[first timers at the orphanage with the sweetest kids. fast friends with all of them!]

[macie and i don't always run to the beach to watch the sunrise, but when we do, we always have a photoshoot. because #picsoritdidnthappen]

[me and my favorite baby girl orphan genesis. i got to the orphanage on this day and they said she was sleeping. i walked in her room and she was asleep on a small mattress with three other little kids. her sister woke her up and genesis saw me and held her arms out for me to pick her up. this picture is after she somehow talked me into giving her a shower (read: she pulled me into the bathroom, took off her clothes, and handed me a bar of soap). we swang on the swings and talked about the crazy chickens and sang "amigaas para siempreeee". i love her so soooooo much! she's such a little nugget.]

food baby lady til i'm eighty!

[mace and i showing off our flowers given to us by little dominican boys. look closely, mine's in my vase bun.]

the second half of our week long vacation was spent in cabarete with a group of us girls. cabarete is always a party! it's the kite surfing beach and it's just beyond sosua beach. cabarete's known for its night-life and reeeeally good food. and good shopping. oh, and good kite surfing. but obviously i'm just there for the food :) anyways, we got to cabarete later in the day because of all the traveling. and you better believe we marched our butts straight to mojitos for dinner. mojitos is one of the many restaurants right on the water. it has the best fresh fruit juice, granisado (frozen fruit juice), sandwiches, fries, and of course yummy mojitos (sin alcohol! that means no alcohol.). alllll for supa cheap!

[ohhhh just me, lookin like a silly in public.]

of course right after i finished my dinner, this little old man kept walking around to all the tables with this little boat made out of leaves and who knows what. and he comes over to me because i made eye contact with me and keeps trying to barter with me and get me to buy it for 50 pesos, which is about $1. and of course he's literally the skinniest man in the world and my belly is all full of food. how could i not buy it, just to give him the money?? it was pretty funny after though because i realized the boat smelled like ish and was covered in bugs and i'm like ohhh what have i gotten myself into?! and i swear that man kept hunting me down all weekend trying to get me to buy his little creations. you give a mouse a cookie! i kept asking people if they liked it and wanted it and they kept smiling and saying "esta bien" haha like nahhh, you keep it. i finally gave it to our taxi driver and said "feliz cumpleanos!" haha. 

and after our scream fest because of how nice our place was that we were staying at, we went to bed. and woke up to this:

[meesh the leper]

[we rented the townhouse we stayed at from some guy on vacation. it was the cutest little beach community! it was mostly older americans and canadians, so it was really quiet and relaxing.]

[complete with a huge kitchen that we all talked about baking all of our american cravings in but never actually did]

another one of our cabarete favorites is fresh fresh. basically we use any excuse in the book to eat here. they do everything right! smoothies, french toast, eggs and toast, burritos, sandwiches, PEANUT BUTTER BROWNIES...everything. you can't go wrong. and there's air conditioning, which is literally a game changer out here (how sad is that). it actually almost sucks going there because you are forced to decide between so many wonderful things. or you do what i do and basically get five of everything every time. they actually kind of hate us here haha. and now i'm going to spam you with pictures and commentary.

[here we have macie chowing down on some french toast, rightfully so.]

[and here we have the holy frijoly burrito, which is a mexican delight. i've gotten it too many times to admit.]

[and here we have me with my literal favorite thing in the DR. judge me, i don't care i don't care i don't care.]

[back at the townhouse! we got macie, courtney, mary, katie, karsen, me, kaylee, and jelina.]

[we gained a lot of weight that weekend. oh, and got flash tattoos! and went hogwild with henna tattoos.]

[debbie, an old lady at our pool, recommended that we eat at lazy dog, which is one of the restaurants on the beach. really yummy flatbread pizza! also we swore we saw a celebrity there and forced jelina to go talk to him like three different times. and got a discount from the owner who happened to be with this "celebrity".]

[more fresh fresh the next day. i just love it so much here! i want to pack it in my suitcase and bring it home.]

 [scrambled eggs and toast and tea, all for 150 pesos, which is a little less than 4 bucks. you can't beat that! also we are all obsessed with this flaxseed bread. no, i'm not going to apologize for my fresh fresh ramblings.]

ummm and last but not least, we ate at another restaurant on the beach (can't remember what it's called) on our last night, while it was having a happy hour two for one deal. turns out we decided to run crazy with that deal and ordered SO much food. like somehow i talked myself into getting two pizzas because one of them was free, but at the same time i was still sharing TWO appetizers with karsen. i don't even know, things got crazy real fast and we were all dying laughing with how much food we had ordered. and our waiter was judging us hardcore and we were dying laughing at everything. people probably thought we were drunk! it was too good though.

basically, i love cabarete. i love these girls. i love food. 

th-th-th-th-that's all folks!

hey is for horses, i'll feed you later!

[i know, i know, i'm a natural.]

wednesday morning of our week long vacation, we woke up early and went on a horseback ride to the playa madama. the lady that owned our hostel has lots of horses, so we set up a half-day excursion with her. i've ridden horses a handful of times, but it's still always something to get used to. actually, it's always kinda hilarious to me because you're riding on this thing that just walks around and eats and poops when it wants. i probably was laughing a majority of the time because it feels so silly! i don't know, i'm weird. 

anyyyways, we rode the horses down to the beach (my horse and kaylee's horse literally stopped to eat every two seconds, no matter how many times we pulled back. we kept yelling "no comida! no almuerzo!" which means something like "no food! no lunch!" haha) and hung out for awhile.

 [playa madama. doesn't look super clean up front, but the water's gorgeous once you get out a little further in.]

her horse helpers even climbed up the coconut tree and knocked a ton of green coconuts down for us to drink the coconut water. super cool to watch! although i feel like a brat because i really don't like coconut water at all. in my opinion, it tastes like baby throw up......or what i imagine baby throw up to taste like haha. i still drank it because i didn't want to be rude/i wanted to feel authentic [of course], but i didn't like it. they cut it open and let us eat the coconut meat. and then they cut open the dried out ones on the ground [the brown kind we see at the grocery store] and let us eat the dried coconut. i personally prefer that more than the coconut meat because the coconut meat is kind of rubbery. i feel like i'm eating egg yolks or something! and then we had manzana de coco, which is what happens when the coconut has been on the ground for a long time and starts to sprout. the inside of it tastes like an apple! it's kind of weird. it was interesting to learn about though.

 [if i'm going to drink the baby throw up, i'm at least going to get a photo out of it.]

 [kayleekins and me!]

she took us up to this cave and we walked around inside it for a little while. i'm going to be honest, this was pretty cool but also terrifying. why? oh, because bats were flying around right above us. and then she points out these gigantic spiders with these crazy antennae and calls them "scorpion spiders". and then she's like "everybody turn off all your lights for a bit to truly experience the dark" and i'm like listen lady, this isn't batman where we need to embrace our fears. this is the real world where we turn on all the lights/straight up run our butts out of this bat trap! i didn't say that though, and we did get out of there unscathed. it was pretty neat!...once it was all over and we reflected from afar both physically and emotionally of course. then they took us up to this look out point where you could see for forever. beautiful!

[don't mind my very large, awkward camera bag. i'm slowly turning into a 55-year-old tourist lady.]

we did that for a few hours and by the time we got home, we were STARVING. correction, we were hangry. so we walked all the way down into town [doesn't actually take that long, but on an empty stomach in the middle of the day it somehow takes about five years] and sat down at the first place we found.

 the owner was so nice because he was basically desperate for customers. this town is so cute but it's weird because it's basically deserted right at this time of year. it's definitely got to be off-season. seriously, none of the businesses have change at all, even if you only need like ten pesos back in change. funny thing is is that we found out the only business that happened to have change was the little empanada cart! probably because they were only 35 pesos, so that's where everybody was eating in the town. 

anyways, the restaurant owner was nice and even ran to the grocery store for avocado when kaylee asked if she could get some on her sandwich. i got a big plate of spaghetti, because you know, when on vacation. i learned that "con salsa" just meant "with spaghetti sauce" not actually salsa. anyways, the owner sees the burn on my leg and he's freaking out and saying all this stuff in spanish and all i understand is "con salsa" and i'm thinking he's just talking about my food because he leaves and a little bit later brings out all of our food. so i'm chowing on my food and all the sudden, he comes toward me with a little thing of what looks like tomato paste and starts gesturing to put it on my leg. and of course i'm like what the what?!? apparently he WAS talking about spaghetti sauce earlier and saying that his cousin got a really bad burn and he put spaghetti sauce on it and it made it feel a lot better. and i didn't want to be rude sooooo yeah, i straight up just started rubbing that tomato paste on my burn! haha i seriously felt like a lunatic and laughing because he could honestly tell me to rub a pickle on it and i'd probably do it. anything to make it heal faster!

[this is my "are you SURE you're not just shhhh**ing me right now??" face to the owner haha.]

yeah, so i just walked around town after that with spaghetti sauce on my leg. oh, what a hoot! it was even better this time when the moto taxis came by asking if i wanted a ride because i'd flash them what looked like a bloody looking leg and they got all buggy-eyed and scream haha. so funny! we decided to walk along the beach down to this pier.

[yeah, that's a horse. just a free ranging horse on the trail. totally normal. except if i had the proper resources, you know i'd be stealing that little buddy and taking him home!]

[candid! my head's blocking kaylee of course.]

the second we got down there, i felt prickles all over my body, looked down, saw mosquitos all over my legs, and screamed my head off! an infestation! we booked it out of there right away [even though we still ended up with tons of bites] and walked home.
with tomato paste still on my leg.
like a psycho.
but what else is new?

jungle's calling for ya!

 the second day of our week long vacation, we set up some jeep tour that took us to a random fruit plantation (that we were unaware of so we were super confused at first), playa rincon, annnnd another playa that i can't remember the name of. points for michelle! now time for a butt ton of pictures and that classic meesh commentary that you all know and love.

[the plantation randomly had pigs which were truly the star of the show. i swear on my life, if i am still single by the time i'm 30, i'm getting a teacup pig.]

 [honestly no idea what fruit this is....papaya? looks cool though!]

 [do we see this creepy looking guy? he was our tour guide and he was in love with me. when we first met, he asked if i had a boyfriend, and i said "tengo cinco novios en puerto plata" which means i have five boyfriends in puerto plata. little does he know they're all my 7-year-old second grade boys haha. and he said "you still need one here in samana" haha, clever! he was very nice though and randomly found an aloe vera plant for me to use on my burn.]

[but he does cut a mean mango!]

 [fresh cocoa beans that haven't been dried out yet. looks like garlic!]

 [there's that pretty day 2 burned leg!]

 [this is the beach that i can't remember the name of. playa fria? it had this freshwater creek type of thing that was really cold and then it flowed into the ocean shown above and when you were standing in the water above, you'd get hit with both warm and cold water. so weird!]

[here's our group standing in front of the cold freshwater creek. jeff, me, kendall behind karsen, ryan, courtney, katie, kaylee, and macie!]

 [me and my dominican lover! we even shared a bed the whole week ;)]

 [just looking out into the distance contemplating life ever so casually. pshhh more like "but when we gonna eat??"]

 [and eat we did. lunch was included in the tour and although it doesn't look like anything special, it was one of THE BEST dominican meals i've had out here. basically i need to bring whoever cooked this back home to america with me in my carry on so i can have crispy chicken, rice pilaf, and plantain chips whenever i want.]

 [then we all piled back in the jeep and they drove us down to playa rincon, which really was a pretty beach. it's supposed to be one of the prettiest beaches in the caribbean(side note, just found out i've been spelling caribbean wrong my whole life. i'm a college graduate. it's cool.) and it didn't disappoint! only bummer is that we only got to stay there for 45 min because the tour was ending.]

[so many coconut trees on our way back! i love it.]

and of course we had to end the day with more food. this pizza was sooooo good! for some reason, they dumped practically a whole jar of olives on all of them as you can see. but that played in my favor since nobody else really liked them. we ate and ate and ate, and then when we were stuffed, we walked across the street and all got ice cream bars. because there's always room for ice cream. and then we walked home in the rain with the bats! well i did. because haaaaaillllll no am i ever getting back on those motos locos!