How to stay alive in the Dominican Republic 🇩🇴

The Dominican Republic gets a bad wrap! Sure I did get a shotgun pulled on me while I was there (totally my fault tho! Well actually it was Marcus' fault but I'll get into that later. 😬😂😳 Annnd yes at the bar I'm pretty sure we were being set up to get robbed but WE FROM VIRGINIA THO! 💪🏾) They gonna need to step it up if they're trying to Rob us. Also... I mean ok ok I will concede the fact that Americans WERE dying there (getting killed?). I don't know if you've heard or not but Americans are dying everyday in America too! And it's way more than 9. But besides that! 😂 It was ALLLLL good! 🙌🏾 I was in the DR right when Americans first started dying well being killed and I can tell you from my own personal experience having been there that it's a wonderful place! Now, you probably shouldn't stay at that Hard Rock Cafe I'm just saying 😬 but I flew into Punta Cana and got a rental car from a local dude in Bavaro. Let me tell you how that went down! So I get off my plane and there's a ton of guys with signs saying if you need a rental car to talk to them and they'll hook you up! Don't fall for that. Can they get you a rental car? Yes of course but they're just playing the middle man and trying to get you before you walk out of the airport to the other side and see the rental car companies yourself... Where you can just walk in and get a car like any other place without a middle man taking a cut of your money. It's cheaper too! Those guys take advantage of you being new and confused as to what the process is. Be confident. Walk past them to where they go. They're gonna take your money and buy you something you could've bought on your own without them. I had a reservation with Enterprise and so I walked over to Enterprise to be told they had no more cars... Umm what?! You have literally ONE JOB Enterprise! 😑😑 So now I'm stranded and scrambling. What do I do? I'm in Punta Cana but have to drive over to La Romana which is almost an hour away (btw, traffic laws... Don't exist 😂🤦🏾‍♂️). One of the workers saw my struggle and we conversed in Spanish (I speak Spanish 😏) about my situation and how I needed a car and he called somebody on the phone haha and said he could get me a car. I was like bet, let's get it. A guy with a rental car business from Bavaro drove 30 minutes to me to pick me up. Bavaro is the opposite direction of La Romana (of course it is) and the guy takes me to the town and he has like 7 cars. They all have random ass amounts of gas in them but they weren't that bad. I got a Honda CR-V and the A/C worked and I was more than pleased with that! It wasn't new but it wasn't old either and it was in good shape and had tinted windows. It was a $200 deposit and then like $25-$30 a day. Can't beat that! The taxi to and from the resort was $50 each way and then you'll have to always pay for a taxi since you don't have a car. Bavaro was cool. That's the real Dominican Republic. You won't see any tourist there and I didn't either. The guy I did business with for my rental car was trying to be very accommodating. He was like I know everybody and everything so I can get you a room for cheap anything you need. I didn't doubt him and considered staying there for the night as my resort reservation didn't start until the next day (I got smuggled into the resort so 😅) but there was something about getting my car and my hotel room from the same local Dominican that just didn't sit right with me. I just felt like that was a recipe for getting robbed! He would know what car I have, where I'm staying and what room I'm in, not to mention when I'm there and when I'm not... No thank you. Gotta be smart people. It be them same people that allow this to happen that be like, I don't know how this could've happened! 🤦🏾‍♂️🤦🏾‍♂️🤦🏾‍♂️ How could it have not happened??? Bavaro was also crazy in the fact that there were a lot of dudes legit on the street just pushing drugs and selling women! The services of women, not actual women. Hollering at you like you want a lady? I got beautiful woman very cheap. Again, do you want to get robbed? THIS is how you get robbed! Just say no! Also, offering up every drug under the sun but the most common is weed. Ay papi we got that Dominican Kush Kush! More like Reggie Bush Bush... Allegedly 🤐😂. I'm flying in from Oregon where the weed is recreationally legal and Kush is not just a word but an actual thing. In the DR, you're gonna find brick weed, seedy ass, field turf that your friends tried to smoke in middle school 20 years ago... Allegedly... Just say no. Seriously it's unsmokeable! Don't ever pay for stuff like that. They should be paying YOU to smoke that BS... Allegedly. I had some food (AMAZING) and then got on the road to La Romana. First thing I noticed about driving in the DR was that there are no traffic laws! No stop signs. No speed limits! And if there is, nobody to enforce them! It's like the wild west out there. A four way stop is like playing double dutch and trying to find your chance to "jump in". I saw a man on a moped almost get ran over by a BUS and he had to turn aruptly and then used his leg to kick out at the bus to turn away from it. I also saw another guy on a moped (mopeds are huge here as they're cheap and gas goes a lot further in one than a car) and behind him was a woman and that woman was just HOLDING... A BABY! Read that again! Holding. A. Baby! 😱 I remember thinking to myself that CAN'T be legal! But it is! 🤯 And it was! Stay tuned for Part 2 next week where I tell you about the shotgun story and the attempted robbery story and what it was like on my resort. You won't wanna miss it!