 | Santo Domingo Local Customs | Tips 1 - 10 of 27 |  |
Popular Local Customs | Miscellaneous Local Customs Tips | All Tips (27)
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Casabe is a thin, flat bread made of yuca, also known as cassava. Casabe is one of the few things that we inherited from the Taíno people and that we still enjoy to this day. We have several sorts of casabe: natural, with garlic flavor and filled with different kinds of fruit/marmalade. You can find them in big packages or buffet size, roughly the size of a coffee cup. They're eaten mostly by themselves, as a between meals snack but a lot of Dominicans like eating casabe with chicharrón de cerdo (deep fried pork meat). Yuca is a root and comes in 2 sorts: sweet, which we cook (boil, in empanadas, in arepitas, fried) and eat right away and bitter, which must be processed before consumption and which is the one used to prepare casabe.
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An aguinaldo is a typical get together where people would go singing Christmas songs from door to door, accompanied by our Dominican drums, güira (a cylindrical percussion instrument made of a thin tin sheet, see picture) and accordion. These informal singers and music players are received merrily with ginger tea, coffee, hot chocolate, cookies, empanadas, etc. Sometimes they'd even collect money to make a big sancocho. The most traditional song is a merengue with a not-so-subtle güira sound, and it goes like this, with my loose translation: "Ábreme la puerta (2x, open the door [to me]) que estoy la calle (because I'm [out] on the street) y dirá la gente (and people will say) que esto es un desaire. (that this is a turn down.) allá dentro veo (2x, I see in there) un bulto tapao, (a hidden something) no se si será un lechón asao (I don't know if it'll be a roasted pig)" These parties can be either prearranged some days (or weeks) in advanced or something created by the spur of the moment, usually after we Dominicans get our "doble sueldo" - which is a tax-free 13th pay we get together with our tax deductible December pay.
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