Live the same

It turns out I didn't write a post yesterday, although I was sure I did - memory is a strange thing, or maybe I'm just getting old, haha. Never mind.

I've already mentioned a unique building several times - the Basilica of Our Lady of Altagracia in the city of Higuey. We visited there quite often and explored the whole city. To be honest, the city itself is only interesting in the center - mainly because of the basilica and a few other places that I personally found worth visiting: a park and ruins of houses built in the 19th century.

The rest of the city is pretty dirty. And it mainly consists of two-three-story concrete boxes, a bunch of wires and quite a lot of garbage if you move away from the center. Although garbage is a big problem for the whole Dominican Republic, which is sad.

But let's get back to the basilica - I could just look for information about it on the Internet, but it's boring. I think you can easily do it yourself if you are interested. The building is unusual, especially on the inside, and every time I looked at its massive stained glass window, I couldn't help but think of Star Trek.

The "Star Trek Church" has been parodied many times in popular shows like Futurama, Family Guy, Robot Chicken, and various parody movies and TV shows - and for some reason, what I saw in those parodies, I saw there too...

Please don't be offended if this comparison seems inappropriate to anyone - I'm speaking purely from an architectural and pop culture perspective.

Overall, Higüey is an interesting place, although I wouldn’t want to live there, hahaha. They even hold a carnival once a year — of course, it’s not as massive as in Brazil or like Mardi Gras, but still quite fun.

Almost every time we visited during the day, the city center was nearly empty — no people, hardly any cars, and I only ever saw people in the park during carnival time. That actually worked out well for us, since we could walk around freely and even climbed onto the rooftops of some buildings. But tall buildings are prohibited in this region (there’s some kind of law that says you can’t build higher than the palm trees, so to speak), so you don’t really get any impressive panoramic views.

Maybe it’s just too hot during the day, and only foolish tourists like us are crazy enough to walk around under the blazing sun — or maybe there are other reasons, I don’t know.

And that reminded me of a funny story that happened right there in Higüey — I went with a friend for a walk or maybe to take photos (I don’t even remember the exact reason we went), and we ended up having a rather memorable conversation with a local...