Living in Dominican Republic

What to find about a little more about the Dominican Republic? One of these books can help!

If you are planning on moving to a new country, one point to consider is the language. Spanish is the most frequently spoken language in the DR. You will find pockets of Russian, Italian, Chinese, French and yes even English here, but it is a good idea to have some knowledge of Spanish.

English is taught in the majority of the schools but not many people know it well. You will find higher concentrations in the tourist towns like Santo Domingo, Santiago, Puerto Plato and others. It's not a good idea to rely on that if you are planning to live or vacation anywhere but the heavy tourist areas though.

The second most common language is Creole. There is a large Haitian population here and Creole is the language of the neighboring country of Haiti. This is similar to French, and you might be able to communicate some if you speak French. This seems to be kind of a 50/50 chance. Some seem to be able to use their French to get their point across, others have more difficulty.

There are several differences between Caribbean Spanish and Spain of Mexican Spanish. Caribbean Spanish is a little more simple, while many people have a relatively higher vocabulary, for the most part a simpler form of Spanish is spoken here. I will be going into other differences in other areas of this lens.

There were a few items that influenced our decision to choose the Dominican Republic for our move. One of the big ones was the continued ability to make money. All my work comes from the internet so power and internet access were pretty high on my list.

Power was a bit of an issue here. Most of the country does not have 24 hour power. To compensate we bought an inversor (inverter) with 4 batteries. When we have power the batteries get charged, when no power, the batteries provide power for the house. This takes a little getting used to but works well. In some of the heavy tourist cities power is better, some of them have 24 hour power.

As far as the internet goes, they have a pretty good network here. You can get either DSL or use wireless modems to get a signal from the cell towers. Don't expect a tremendous speed. I usually get between 1and 2 mb. I use the wireless modem so I can go anywhere on the island and have internet for my laptop. That works well for those "working" vacations where I spend a hour or two a day working and then spend the rest of the day playing.

Because my work would be limited I needed my US Dollar to have a high value to the local currency. You get about 35-38 pesos to the dollar here so your dollar goes pretty far. You can get a pretty nice house for between $150 and $650 per month here depending on what you call pretty nice and where you are in the country. Food cost about the same as in the US but everything else is much cheaper.

The DR also has pretty liberal laws as far as visas go. You can extend your visa up to three time (as of 11/29/11) and after that you will need to leave the country and then can reenter again for another year. So once a year we visit family in the states and then return for a year. You can also hop the border to Haiti to restart the process if you don't want to pay for a plane trip. These rules change frequently so you have to keep up to date on them. The alternative is to apply for residency, this is a bit of a pain but is worth it if you plan on living here permanently or for more than a few year.

Likely you are going to want to keep in touch with people back home. Long distance can be a bit expensive. A good solution to that is using Magic Jack.

Yes, Magic Jack works in the DR. You will get a US telephone number for people to call and you can call anyone in the US at no extra charge. You will get a long distance charge if you want to make phone calls in the Dominican Republic (except to other Magic Jack users), so you will likely also want a local cell phone for local (DR) calls.

Magic Jack uses and internet connection to make your phone calls. When you sign up you get a telephone number in a location of choice in the US. This will be the number people will use to contact you so make sure that it is close to the people you want to stay in touch with.

When people call the number, if you have your computer set up and the phone plugged in, then it will ring like any normal phone. Otherwise the call goes to your voice mail and you get an email that someone called you with the wav file so you can listen to the message.

Best of all it's cheap. For about $60 for 5 years you get unlimited use on your "internet phone". Other cost include about $30 to buy the Magic Jack usb module, you also need a standard land line style telephone and then of course internet access. Magic Jack works best on an internet speed of at leas 1 MB.

Magic Jack Plus
There is now the new Magic Jack Plus that allows you to use Magic Jack without a computer. I haven't tried this yet but I would assume that it will use a Wi-Fi connection to get internet access.