Do Ray and Sue not own the Brit now ? Obviously I have not been to Sosua for a year plus so I am a little out of the loop.
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A lot of businesses closed in Sosua
Do Ray and Sue not own the Brit now ? Obviously I have not been to Sosua for a year plus so I am a little out of the loop.
Yes, Ray sold. Brittania is now owned by a wonderful and personable guy. He has not made any changes to the menu.
Some photos of the crowds from the sixth annual Multicultural Festival last weekend in Sos?a. Once again a well run event with good attendance and community support.
Mayor Ilana Neumann organized and started this festival in the first year of her first term as mayor of Sos?a and it has now become an annual tradition. It was a refreshing change, even if only for a few days, arriving from Puerto Plata each evening and being greeted by the sights and sounds pictured above.
Oh! Missed that. I hope they did well out of it and moved on to something they'll be happy with. wbr
Some photos of the crowds from the sixth annual Multicultural Festival last weekend in Sos?a. Once again a well run event with good attendance and community support.
Mayor Ilana Neumann organized and started this festival in the first year of her first term as mayor of Sos?a and it has now become an annual tradition. It was a refreshing change, even if only for a few days, arriving from Puerto Plata each evening and being greeted by the sights and sounds pictured above.
A very nice festival. Well run and lots of fun. They really should look at running it in tourist season....but maybe that is not the goal.
tltr
One area that the DR lags behind other parts of the world that attracts gringos is this country's ability to communicate directly with the tourist/expat population.
Announcements for many activities from vehicle/moto registration and placa replacement, government announcements, festivals to planned power outages and everything else is not reaching a portion of the resident population in a timely manner.
Many on DR1 are really good bringing some of this info to the attention of others, but sometimes not in time for everyone to act on it. I remember last year only learning of the need for a new placa for my moto either the last day of or the day after the exchange at the local city hall in Sousa. I couldn't do it anyway because I was still waiting for my matricula at the time, months after the purchase, but that is another matter. If not for that announcement on DR1, I wouldn't know to this day that event took place.
This is not a discussion on who should be speaking Spanish or who should be making the extra effort to read the newspapers. *It is none-the-less a failure on the part of all levels of govt., event organizers, public agencies and civil defense entities to have an established means to disseminate understandable information in a timely manner. Really, how hard is it for COE to post their bulletins in Spanish first with an English translation following at the bottom? If the goal is to save lives, I would think that the bulletins would be posted in several languages. That way when the cell phone alert is received those who are interested can go and get the detailed information the Govt wants the population to know.*
An English language internet radio station would go a long way to solving many of these problems. Even a single news broadcast each day in English would be invaluable. A central website that is use by the authorities and others to make announcements by region/city would also work. There are only so many hours in a day that most Spanish challenged people can devote to searching out and plugging stuff into google translate trying to stay informed.
My Spanish is much better than when I arrived. I can do things and get my point across, maybe not elegantly, but I can communicate. Watching Dominican TV stations is a skill I have not yet mastered. Watching a bunch of people speaking to each at lightening speed and at volume above mute is still really hard to follow. English subtitles for news programming don't seem to be available. When looking at the various newspapers online it is still difficult and time consuming for me to separate the wheat from the chaff.* I guess knowing who is shooting at who is important but I would rather know the day to day stuff that requires my attention and action. I knew of the food festival in Sosua last year because someone mentioned it on DR1. I knew about it this year a day or two ahead of time again because someone on DR1 mentioned it. I live in Sosua and am in town at least every two days and I saw or heard nothing about this festival. No posters, no flyers on bulletin boards and no scuttle butt from the guy on the stool next to me.*
I don't know what I am doing wrong, but it must be something as just about everything happening here comes as a surprise out of the blue.
I'm not demanding or expecting accommodation in this regard and it is truly my responsibility to do all that i can to inform myself and communicate in the language of this country. However, knowing that there are those who don't get the message or can't understand the message, at the very least, authorities in places with significant foreign residents could certainly do a better job of communicating in a more effective and timely manner, especially if they are expecting compliance of some sort.
If I was younger and planning on being here longer than I am, I would add this to my already long list of things to do to make the country more user friendly and responsive to the basic needs of those who choose to live here.* Maybe the lack of white faces in the festival pictures is a function of the time that the pictures were taken. More likely, many white faces who would have attended didn't know about the event in sufficient detail to add it to their calendar.*
One area that the DR lags behind other parts of the world that attracts gringos is this country's ability to communicate directly with the tourist/expat population.
Announcements for many activities from vehicle/moto registration and placa replacement, government announcements, festivals to planned power outages and everything else is not reaching a portion of the resident population in a timely manner.
Many on DR1 are really good bringing some of this info to the attention of others, but sometimes not in time for everyone to act on it. I remember last year only learning of the need for a new placa for my moto either the last day of or the day after the exchange at the local city hall in Sousa. I couldn't do it anyway because I was still waiting for my matricula at the time, months after the purchase, but that is another matter. If not for that announcement on DR1, I wouldn't know to this day that event took place.
This is not a discussion on who should be speaking Spanish or who should be making the extra effort to read the newspapers. *It is none-the-less a failure on the part of all levels of govt., event organizers, public agencies and civil defense entities to have an established means to disseminate understandable information in a timely manner. Really, how hard is it for COE to post their bulletins in Spanish first with an English translation following at the bottom? If the goal is to save lives, I would think that the bulletins would be posted in several languages. That way when the cell phone alert is received those who are interested can go and get the detailed information the Govt wants the population to know.*
An English language internet radio station would go a long way to solving many of these problems. Even a single news broadcast each day in English would be invaluable. A central website that is use by the authorities and others to make announcements by region/city would also work. There are only so many hours in a day that most Spanish challenged people can devote to searching out and plugging stuff into google translate trying to stay informed.
My Spanish is much better than when I arrived. I can do things and get my point across, maybe not elegantly, but I can communicate. Watching Dominican TV stations is a skill I have not yet mastered. Watching a bunch of people speaking to each at lightening speed and at volume above mute is still really hard to follow. English subtitles for news programming don't seem to be available. When looking at the various newspapers online it is still difficult and time consuming for me to separate the wheat from the chaff.* I guess knowing who is shooting at who is important but I would rather know the day to day stuff that requires my attention and action. I knew of the food festival in Sosua last year because someone mentioned it on DR1. I knew about it this year a day or two ahead of time again because someone on DR1 mentioned it. I live in Sosua and am in town at least every two days and I saw or heard nothing about this festival. No posters, no flyers on bulletin boards and no scuttle butt from the guy on the stool next to me.*
I don't know what I am doing wrong, but it must be something as just about everything happening here comes as a surprise out of the blue.
I'm not demanding or expecting accommodation in this regard and it is truly my responsibility to do all that i can to inform myself and communicate in the language of this country. However, knowing that there are those who don't get the message or can't understand the message, at the very least, authorities in places with significant foreign residents could certainly do a better job of communicating in a more effective and timely manner, especially if they are expecting compliance of some sort.
If I was younger and planning on being here longer than I am, I would add this to my already long list of things to do to make the country more user friendly and responsive to the basic needs of those who choose to live here.* Maybe the lack of white faces in the festival pictures is a function of the time that the pictures were taken. More likely, many white faces who would have attended didn't know about the event in sufficient detail to add it to their calendar.*
The festival as presented would not have been very interesting to most gringos. *It was targeted to the native population. *The music, for example, even by Dominican standards, was mediocre this year.*
There was an attempt at an English language radio station. *It failed.* *Radio is so 70's.
The DR governments release information in Spanish and uses the local and national news to do so. To learn what is happening, it is best to pay attention to those direct sources. There are some sources like Sosua News and DR1 that have some of this information, but you are in a country where Spanish is the norm.*
The asterisks appear to be a feature of this forum when using Google Chrome on certain operating systems. I use Linux.*
There was an attempt at an English language radio station. *It failed.* *Radio is so 70's.
The DR governments release information in Spanish and uses the local and national news to do so. To learn what is happening, it is best to pay attention to those direct sources. There are some sources like Sosua News and DR1 that have some of this information, but you are in a country where Spanish is the norm.*
The asterisks appear to be a feature of this forum when using Google Chrome on certain operating systems. I use Linux.*
I just used the festival as an example of an event that took place and apparently will be a reoccurring event. I am not sure what day it started, what day it ended and what hours it was in operation.*
I do visit the national media sites, read DR1 news posts, Sosua News, Deltras and others and still feel that I am woefully ill informed. I understand the DR is a uni-lingual country and I accept that I have to work that much harder to seek out the information that I need. My main point is that even doing all that I can manage, I still do not see or hear about many things that I need to know. A lot of the information I see is what I term "after the fact" reporting. Something happened, someone said or by some date you should have done something. I don't very often see announcements of upcoming events such as the Prez Danilio will be speaking at the UN in two weeks or that Migracion will be changing the requirements for residency renewal in 90 days. In the case of the latter it is usually, effective two weeks ago renewal now requires guarantor insurance as opposed to a signed letter...
City hall in Sosua could, I assume run a website where it could announce upcoming public meetings, changes to operations and other info of general interest about events and policies that the population should be aware of with sufficient notice to actually attend said meetings or placa replacement events.
It is the difficulty in finding the info in the first place that is the biggest problem, understanding the info is secondary.*
* - I am using a chrome variant on Win10. For me these * didn't start appearing until the line feed problem that others were experiencing was addressed.*
I do visit the national media sites, read DR1 news posts, Sosua News, Deltras and others and still feel that I am woefully ill informed. I understand the DR is a uni-lingual country and I accept that I have to work that much harder to seek out the information that I need. My main point is that even doing all that I can manage, I still do not see or hear about many things that I need to know. A lot of the information I see is what I term "after the fact" reporting. Something happened, someone said or by some date you should have done something. I don't very often see announcements of upcoming events such as the Prez Danilio will be speaking at the UN in two weeks or that Migracion will be changing the requirements for residency renewal in 90 days. In the case of the latter it is usually, effective two weeks ago renewal now requires guarantor insurance as opposed to a signed letter...
City hall in Sosua could, I assume run a website where it could announce upcoming public meetings, changes to operations and other info of general interest about events and policies that the population should be aware of with sufficient notice to actually attend said meetings or placa replacement events.
It is the difficulty in finding the info in the first place that is the biggest problem, understanding the info is secondary.*
* - I am using a chrome variant on Win10. For me these * didn't start appearing until the line feed problem that others were experiencing was addressed.*
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I think there were mentions of the festival on Sosuanews well before hand with start and end dates.
But it is true that as it is called "multi-cultural" festival, there should have been a few posters around town in English, and may be a few songs, foods or something multi-cultural there as well. Though you can put that down to people from other cultures not participating enough and not coming forward to offer something. Dominicans can not offer much in English, French, Italian or German.
On Friday and Saturday there were quite a few foreigners, ex-pat singles, couples or with their families that I saw, didn't go on the final day Sunday. I guess there were a lot more locals on Sunday...
But it is true that as it is called "multi-cultural" festival, there should have been a few posters around town in English, and may be a few songs, foods or something multi-cultural there as well. Though you can put that down to people from other cultures not participating enough and not coming forward to offer something. Dominicans can not offer much in English, French, Italian or German.
On Friday and Saturday there were quite a few foreigners, ex-pat singles, couples or with their families that I saw, didn't go on the final day Sunday. I guess there were a lot more locals on Sunday...
i posted about this festival in north coast calendar sticky back in august. the post is still there. i edited it last week adding a link with more info.
the info is easily available, you only have yourself to blame for not paying attention.
Again, my post wasn't really about the festival per se. The festival was just an example of an event that does not appear to have been well communicated to the population on the margins that live in and around Sosua. I did mention that I was aware of the festival before it started probably because of your posts DV8.*
I'm not assigning blame or suggesting that posters on DR1 do not go out of their way to inform. I am just pointing out that in general, for people who have difficulty understanding native Spanish on TV and the radio, access to timely and sometimes very important information can be difficult to find, process and digest.*
I have acknowledged that it is my responsibility to inform myself and I try. I am not always successful. DR1 helps a lot but not everyone who needs to know stuff is on DR1 or Everything Sosua. What is of importance to me, may not be of importance to someone else.*
I was just implying that it is difficult and time consuming and that's not entirely my fault. I don't blame myself. I do the best I can and that's all I can do. Those who wish to speak to people like me could increase the chances of us getting their message with a small investment in effort, but only if getting the message out to an audience they are not currently reaching is important to them. If this is not a concern for the message senders, then so be it.
There will come a time, when I will consider moving on and my ability at that time to function in this place or in this country and how much effort that requires will be taken into consideration. Right now, I feel as if I am not as well informed as I would like to be despite spending significant time daily seeking out information that is relevant to me and my life here.*
Thx for kicking me while I was down rather than offer a scosh of empathy and encouragement.*
you deserved the kick, sorry, not sorry. what do you want the government to do, hold your weenie when you pee? if something interests you, learn about it. stop sitting on ya butt, being all specialsnowflakey about life. you only have one. don't expect others to serve you throughout.