two things tick me off. first all the self rightous people living here and trying to inflict their misguided, tainted, self-serving morals and principles on a culture that they dont understand. second, the main thing that most tourist and ex-pats seem to ignore is that we are all guests in this country and can be asked to leave at any time no matter who you know or what you own....
At the end of the day, a foreigner is nothing more than a foreigner always has been and always will be.
Not that there is anything particularly wrong with that, but we Dominicans do tend to look at non-Dominicans or expats under a different filter than we do everybody else regardless where we may find ourselves.
One thing we are very much aware of is that no foreigner could ever truly know what it means to be a Dominican in every sense of the word. They can stereotype, study us, attempt to assimilate into Dominican culture, but at the end of the day they will always be "extranjeros".
Dominicans DO talk alot about the expat community in the DR, of course we will never say anything in their faces, but we do talk and talk and talk, much in the way the expats talk about us.
Funny how both sides treat the other as uneducated little kids in these discussions, feeling pitty for the otherside for "not knowing any better" in whatever is being discussed.
The foreigners do that in their judgement of Dominican culture, actions, and general day to day living and Dominicans do this in judging how well a foreigner may think he knows Dominicans vs. how much he actually knows. But, since a person has to be born and filled with Dominican nationalism from the day they are born onward to fully understand Dominicans, most expats will never get it.
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More to the subject matter.
Even though this thread is more about "gringos opinions of gringos", I must say that it's amusing seeing a bunch of foreigners moving to the DR to "get away from the ways of their old country". That is what many say is the reason for moving to the DR.
Funny how once they are in the DR, all many of them do is complain at the fact that everything in the DR is done the Dominican way and not like in their old country which they left because they did not like many of the things of their old country to begin with.
Ay ya yay!
-NALs:ermm:
