Wettest... 4th of July... ever. No, seriously. EVER. Did it rain on your 4th of July? I can assure you, it rained more here. In fact it didn't stop raining. EVER. The whole day. I'm not embellishing. It's still raining.
That being said though, my, my I had a good time. The biggest party of the year at the Embassy is the 4th of July party, and though the estimates were somewhere around 500-600 of the possible 1000-1100 people expected to show up, that was actually ok since there was precious little space to stand and still manage to stay dry anyway. It's a bit of a pity, as the Embassy has pretty nice grounds, and there were all these little tables set up on the lawn that would have been lovely in nice weather, but Mother Nature had other nefarious soggy plans.
I got to play pretend diplomat and help out by corralling the VIPs through the entryway, as they walked through I greeted them in my few words of Spanish; "welcome! Good evening." and gesture them into the next room, hoping they wouldn't try to talk to me. If they did, I nodded with wide eyes until I could smile and inform them that my Spanish was "no mucho, lo siento." I shook hands and kissed cheeks of people in high, high places... and I have no idea who any of them were.
One of the highlights of the evening was hearing the National Anthem being sung as peals of thunder rumbled in the skies and rain poured down in buckets - BUCKETS! By the time I got to the buffet line (which was under a tent but on the lawn) it was a mud runway.
Much to our surprise, in spite of the rain there were fireworks that burst in all their color and glory and no doubt scared the shit out of Dominicans who weren't aware it was the US Independence Day. It was pretty cool though, standing in mud on the lawn of the US Embassy in Santo Domingo holding a whiskey and soda, watching pyrotechnics and thinking about how damn lucky I am to be me.
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