It's a rainy Sunday and I'm catching up on some shows on my DVR. One of them is a Destination HD episode on the Dominican Republic. I like this show because unlike many travelogues they try to paint a real honest picture of a place with both the beauty and the warts alike. After hearing several Dominicans talk about how difficult it is to make ends meet, the show moves onto a coastal town where they talk to a German man who bought the villa previously owned by Falco. He's asked about the poverty that co-exists around him.
This is his response:
"There is a lot of poverty around here, we all know that. But we shouldn't measure ourselves against that. We just want to live our lives here in the Caribbean as pleasantly as we can, in the standard we know from home. That's something that we have to keep up!"
Excuse me?
It doesn't bother him that the majority of Dominicans are struggling to put food on the table? What sort of plantation mindset is that? He's so Marie Antoinette about it, that I want to just yank him by his naff ponytail and see how he could survive on a 20 peso a day salary.
Really, if you're going to live in an ivory tower, fine. Just be cognizant that you are living in one and that a "let them eat cake" attitude will come to bite you in the ass sooner rather than later.
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