A Night at the Oloffson

After a day of distributing over 2,500 school books to our scholarship students and having to put one of the Mission House's dogs down, a night out was in order.  What do 3 Americans and one Dominican do on a Saturday night in Port-au-Prince?  We become a cliche by going to the Hotel Oloffson, probably the biggest ex-pat hang out in PAP to hear Sweet Mickey, a konpa band, play.  Now a ticket to show program as they call concerts here was 500 goudes or $12 US, which is comparable to a show at the Black Cat in DC, so to save some money we smuggled in street food for dinner (rice, bbq chicken, plantains, and spicy coleslaw or what Haitians call pik lees) and two flasks of Haitian rum.  I felt a little bit like an eight grader trying to sneak into an R rated movie, but I justify it by saying we were supporting the local street vendors instead of the international institution that is the Hotel Oloffson. 

The show was suppose to start at 11, but the opening band did not even come on until midnight.  After an hour of Ram, the Oloffson house band, Sweet Mickey finally made an appearance at 1:00 am only to play one song and then have to stop as one of their amps started smoking.  While the night did not go as planned, it was certainly fun and the Hotel Oloffson all

 lit up at night and packed with people is definitely an experience.  I know the photo above is a little blurry, but at least it gives you an idea of what it was like.  

Even if the night was long and the band we paid to see malfunctioned it was still a memorable evening as Frank and I celebrated the dawning of our one year wedding anniversary and I got to finally dance to konpa music with the man I love.  We definitely were not the only blancs in attendance, but we might have been the most rhythmically challenged couple there.  Oh, well it was fun!

Emotional state:  content

Goal: to learn how to konpa correctly