Day 39

A man with a camera is not generally extended a very warm welcome in an industrial neighborhood. The people you meet in these areas tend to have a hard time believing anyone would choose to spend his free time, or could find anything interesting or beautiful, in their corner of the world, and so they instead assume you're up to no good, and treat you accordingly with suspicion.

But sometimes you run into someone like Fernando, whose natural instinct is to embrace the world around him rather than question it. If some weird dude with a camera happens by, maybe you can have some good laughs with him instead of worrying what he's doing there.

As I approached Fernando's auto parts shop (I assume that's what it was — there were ten million side-view mirrors hanging from the walls and ceiling), I noticed a window full of snapshots. On closer inspection, all the pictures featured someone sitting in a chair with some sort of horns sticking out from the top of their head. As soon as Fernando saw me looking at the photos, he invited me to take a seat in the famous chair so he could photograph me, and he was happy to pose for my camera as well. I couldn't communicate with him well enough to ask about the significance of the horns, but his co-worker did excitedly show me another impressive pair, this one mounted above the fire extinguisher and attached to a cattle skull that looked like it came straight from a clichéd movie desert.

(On the wall behind him you can see a poster for Hipólito Mejía, who is opposing Danilo Medina in the upcoming Dominican presidential election.)