Chapter 27: The End

We had a lovely few days together sampling all variety of terrible meals in old Havana and one awesome meal at a Paladar in Miramar with a pretty tranquil terrace setting, a great guitarist and great food and drinks. We were lucky enough to be in town during an international dance festival and were treated to several amazing dance performances on the street and in several of the various quaint squares and parks in the old city. On my parents last day in town we took a short wander through Vedado, dropped in to visit Cari at the house I had stayed at earlier in my trip, stocked up on rum and coffee and guava jelly – headed home for dinner in the city - which consisted of fermented orange juice, glue soup and raw chicken –all of which we sent promptly back to the kitchen because it was so foul tasting.

Dance festival parade

boxing ring - no fights on a Sunday apparently

Last and best pina colada

enjoying a rare awesome meal in miramar neighborhood

So my parents left me to pass one last day on my own in the one place on my trip that I just couldn’t manage to love. I wandered around took photos did some shopping, changed my last bit of money – ate one final questionable and inhospitable meal and spent the evening packing. In the morning I went out and bought some Cuban movie posters and then I got a cab to the airport. Thankfully my final ride out of the city was with an uncommonly friendly and chatty cab driver who talked with me all the way to the airport about life and learning a second language and wanting to move to the states. I passed through Cuban customs with no problems and was in no time on my way to Toronto feeling almost giddy at being free from Cuba.

So my final week in Cuba has been and gone and although the chill of the Toronto airport is making me rather miss the heat – I have to say that I am glad to be back in my home and native land – or at least glad to be out of Cuba. I just could not shake the perception that if someone there was being nice to me, it was because they wanted something from me, and though I’m certain that is probably not usually the case, I certainly felt that it was in at least 8 of 10 encounters – and I could never tell whether or not my rip-off radar was misfiring.

After passing some more time in the more touristy quarters of Havana and of Cuba in general, I began to feel like some kind of despised royalty – at least to people working in the hospitality industry – they will take your order, but when your back is turned they put someone’s left over beans and rice on your dinner plate. On one occasion a local travel agent – who was obviously not loving her job that day - rolled her eyes at me for asking a question after purchasing a bus ticket from her. I suppose this is what happens when highly educated people opt to work in tourism because it pays more (at least in tips) than they could ever hope to earn as an electrician, teacher, engineer, or doctor.

Last few sites in Havana

Anyhow – saying goodbye to the good the bad and the ugly of Cuba - I jumped off my plane in Toronto – jumped on a bus to Kingston – thought better of the decision of having to transfer busses and of spending 9 hours on a bus and of arriving in Montreal at 3:30 in the morning – jumped off the bus to Kingston – Jumped on a plane to Montreal – jumped on a bus to downtown – got confused trying to speak French to the bus driver when only Spanish words would come out of my mouth – said thank you and goodbye to the bus driver who turned out to be a Spanish speaker anyhow - wandered around lost on the streets of Montreal at midnight with an unruly amount of luggage –gave up trying to find the address and phoned Patricia - got unlost and spent my first night in Montreal shivering from the cold too exhausted to get up to throw a spare blanket on the bed but already quite content with this relatively unplanned post – holiday holiday.

The next day, we spent the whole day being lazy and not leaving the house until 7pm when we went off to Patricia’s Brazilian drumming class where I was lucky enough to enjoy a drumming orchestra all to myself – I thought of all the times I had tried to chase down the source of drumming in Cuba without success – and thought that this was probably better. Then we went out with some of the drummers to a quite little pub with probably the worst ever 1970s rock cover band – ever – had a drink and went home. The next few days were spent exploring Montreal and being lazy and eating poutine and smoking Cuban cigarillos and getting a sore throat, and before I knew it, it was time to go home to the west coast.

I quickly arranged to prepare some Canadian comfort food at my first opportunity

Montreal streescape - beautiful city!

Montreal smoked meat sandwich - not quite as good as the Montreal smoked meat poutine I had the night before - but good none the less.

For the first time ever I decided not to get to the airport too ridiculously early so planned on catching the bus that would get me there about an hour and a bit before my flight, and for the first time ever there was a disastrous traffic jam and the bus was late and didn’t get to the airport until about half an hour before my flight, but then for the first time ever, my flight was out and out cancelled so they put me on a later flight and gave me a voucher for a free meal and I was ok with that, and I got my free lunch and waited for the plane and ran into a friend that I hadn’t seen in at least a few years.

Then I got to Toronto to switch to my Vancouver bound flight –got amazed by the futuristic pod-like first class seats, got seated beside a smokey smelling guy – watched two movies – got home and found out my cousin had been on the same flight as me - went home and slept in a 20 year old bed that felt brand new compared to every bed I had slept on in Cuba – and sheets that felt like silk compared to all the sheets I had slept in Cuba. And it was nice to be home.

Chapter 26: Valley De Vinales

I made it to Vinales by about 6pm, and got off the bus to a swarm of about 20 casa particular owners trying to convince people to come to their houses. Vinales, I had read, had the most plentiful and the best selection of casa particulars in the country. For this reason I hadn’t made a reservation in advance but I did have an address of a recommended place – I made the mistake of telling someone the place I was planning on going and suddenly there were five people offering to take me there, or telling me they were full or claiming that it was their house – there was one women who tried all three consecutively so that by the time she got around to saying it was her house, it was 100% obvious that it wasn’t – but that didn’t stop her from trying to convince me it was her house- in a bid to escape this flurry I marched off in what I thought was the right direction, but then a helpful fireman steered me right.

I had to walk back past the bus station where a few straggling casa touters were still hanging around, including the “owner” of the casa I was looking for who once again offered to take me to her house – and when I refused one last time I she finally seemed to give up and said she’d be waiting there for me in case it was full. Just then the real owner of the casa (or at least the son of the real owner) drove by on his scooter and after some convincing, I agreed to let him take me there. It was the correct house and when we got there the very gracious host informed me she was full, so she took me next door to a little one room backyard bungalow, and with a quick look at the amazing view out the window, and a quick reassurance that the door (which had obviously been kicked in at some point in the past) was secure I accepted the room dumped my stuff and went for a walk around town.

When I got back, an amazing dinner of bean soup, salad and plantain chips awaited me. The moment I dug into the soup, a plate of rice appeared on the table – making it an amazingly large dinner. A moment later a potato omelet landed in front of me, followed by a plate of fruit and a jug of juice – making an absurdly large meal. I had told my hostess that I wasn’t very hungry and could just eat a small meal – like what they normally serve for breakfast, what I ended up with was breakfast plus lunch minus the meat entre. I decided to switch from beans to eggs thinking that the beans and rice would keep well for lunch the next day. I managed to eat the whole omelet, half of the plantain chips, and all the fruit. When I excused myself from the table my host declared with shock that I had hardly eaten anything. When I asked to save the beans and rice for the next day she was even more taken aback. So I took my leftover salad to store in the fridge in my bungalow and got ready to shower off the 12 hour bus ride.

It was pretty well dark now – so all the lights went on in my room and all the windows got closed. This is when I noticed some rat droppings around the bathroom window, and some other kind of dropping (later discovered to be from a lizard) all over the wall. Then I got in the shower and noticed it definitely hadn’t been cleaned in a while. Then I noticed that the hot water didn’t work. I was very used to taking cold showers in hot climates by now, and taking luke warm showers in cold climates but taking cold showers in cold climates I just cannot get used to so I had a very quick rinse and got ready for bed lamenting the fact that I had somehow managed to get a crappy casa in a town where I could have had the best in the country for the same price – then the pig next door started to have a very noisy snorting hissy fit about something, and I drifted off to sleep.

The next morning I very politely informed my hostess that I wouldn’t be staying a second night because there were droppings all around the room and the hot water didn’t work. I said I had another place in mind and she looked me squarely in the eye and said “you want to move because you are nervous about the door – I will find you another place with a secure room inside the house.” I thought for a moment about this response and then agreed that yes I wanted to move because I was nervous but that I could find another place on my own - in the end she insisted that she would find me a room in a nice house with neighbours and if I didn’t like it I could find my own place but that there were lots of bad people out there and that she would only place me with good people. The new room was nice and secure and free from mysterious animal droppings so I hastily agreed to take it and ran off to catch the bus for my day excursion to Cayo Levisa –

Cayo Levisa is a small beautiful tropical island just off the coast with a little bungalow type hotel and a few restaurants catering to the hotel visitors and day trippers. The road to the dock to get the ferry to the Cayo was amazingly scenic but also long – we finally reached the dock, got loaded into the boat and were on our way when a group of guests that arrived late and had the whole boat turned around to come back for them – taking up about 30 precious minutes of the five short hours the day trippers would have to spend on the island. The ferry landed and we took a five minute board -walk through the jungle before laying eyes on the pristine beach. I walked a little ways and picked out a nice spot for my sarong – parked my stuff and jumped in the water – it was COLD – but the day was hot so that was ok – then I got all suncreened up and spent the day catching a few last precious rays of Caribbean beach sun – conveniently interspersed with shady periods courtesy of the fluffy white clouds floating across the sky – it was the perfect day for beach bumming and I left perfectly content that it was four hours of well spent bus time.

The dock leaving the mainland for Cayo Levisa

Beautiful paradisaical beach

me on the beautiful paradisaical beach

Back in Vinales I had an amazing dinner in my new casa- composed of fish, plantain fries, beans, rice, fruit, veg and the most amazing pinacolada ever made – I went out late in the evening to meet up with some new friends from the Cayo Levisa trip at some kind of musical venue in town that was included with our day-trip. It was ten o’clock at night but I was assured that nothing bad ever happens in Vinales, so off I went with nothing to worry about except the rain and the stray dogs which, I was told can smell foreigners and love to bug them. The musical performances were very interesting and the most racy I had seen yet with female dancers decked out in sparkling thongs and male dancers wearing extremely tight spandex pants and apparently not much more. We were treated to some traditional cabaret type dancing and then to some kind of extremely cheesy emotional modern dance performance – by a guy in black spandex bellbottoms and ballet shoes. I drank my complementary martini, bid farewell my foreigner friends, and wandered home noticing that there was decidedly less harassment at night than in the day, I suppose because there were just less people around.

After a very good night’s sleep in my rat poo free room, I set off on my tour of the country side around Vinales. For ten bucks you get a tour guide almost all to yourself (plus 4 other people_ for four hours – which is a pretty great deal – especially for Cuba. We wandered through several farms, heard about how the hurricanes regularly tear through the homes and baseball stadiums in the area, heard about how tobacco is produced, heard about natural history, tasted some fresh local coffee, watched a cigar being rolled, tried a freshly rolled cigar – and that was it. I went home for a final delicious Vinales meal and then headed back to Havana to meet up with my parents.

Valle de Vinales

Farm in the valley



Tobacco drying shed in the valley

Inside the tobacco drying shed in the valley

Farm house in the valley

Chapter 25: Twenty-nine in Trinadad

The next day, which also happened to be my birthday, I ventured out at 5 in the morning to fetch my parents from the Varadero airport and whisk them off to Trinidad. Trinidad is a very beautiful town with ancient cobbled streets and quaint colonial buildings, it also sports a very lovely white sand beach just an 8 dollar cab ride away. We arrived at the bus stop and a row of casa particular owners were waiting in a neat line behind a rope trying to get the business of the new arrivals.

I had been warned by a woman in Havana that booked us the casa that there was a common scam where people are intercepted at the bus station and taken to different casas than the ones that they actually booked – with the story that the place they booked made an error and was full – but really they are just scammers out to steal all your stuff – or at least your payment for the night’s stay. When we arrived what I thought was our casa particular owner met us at the bus stop with my name on a sign – but when we were taken to a different address than the one I had written down – I became suspicious and demanded to be taken to the proper address – the owner tried to explain that the other house was full at which point I became even more suspicious. I got to the house of the casa we had booked and confirmed and the owner said that yes indeed they were full – I asked why she had said they could accommodate me in the first place and she went on with a lengthy story about what had happened and I told her about my concern about the scam, and my disappointment in being put in another location without first being consulted, and in the end she concluded that we could stay there.

Once we had gotten our stuff moved in she was kind enough to explain to me about how annoyed the other casa owner was since he had come to the station to meet us and I explained back how if someone had explained what was going to happen things could have gone much more smoothly, but that we felt very bad to have let down the other casa owner and were just reacting in a chaotic situation, and that we were very sorry that he was put out, and after enough apologizing she changed her tune and said that these things happen. Once settled in we wandered out in search of food and sights. We wandered the streets for a while and went for an excellent dinner at a paladar with dirty table cloths but tasty food. The following day we hit the beach – and what a beautiful beach it was – with white sand and blue water and much more loveliness than I had every expected – we walked to the end of the beach and back again, picked out a shady spot under a palm tree – and relaxed until it was time to go and meet our cab driver. We had a little driving tour back into Trinidad with a quick pass through a cute little fishing village called La Boca.

Quaint little street in Trinidad

Scoping out the evenings entertainment options

the beach near Trinidad

Birthday dinner at a very good paladar in trinidad

Breakfast in the courtyard at our casa particular

View from a church tower

different view, same church tower

We got cleaned up back at our casa particular, went begging at the hotel to get some money changed (since all the exchange offices were closed) and then, went out in search of somewhere to eat. After an intentional scenic detour and an unintentional lost detour we arrived at another palladar and waited in line for twenty minutes before getting seated at a very short table and getting served a very tasty meal of fish for me, and lamb for my parents, then we took in a brief musical spectacle before heading home to bed. We rose early the next morning to catch the bus back toward Havana. I let my folks off the bus in Havana (hoping they would make it to the casa particular a-ok) and continued on to the cute little town of Vinnales another three hours down the road.

Chapter 24: Matanzas Matanzes Matanzes

In the still dark early morning I got delivered to the Hershey Casablanca train station by a rather disorientated cab driver who claimed to have never taken a fair to this destination in the day time so how could I expect him to find his way in the dark. I waddled out to the train platform with my ten thousand bags and suddenly I had about a half dozen pairs of eyes on me as the only gringo at the station. After about twenty minutes it was time to board and after another 10 the creaky old electric train was chugging along as the guide wires above sent off showers of sparks that lit up snatches of the dark urban landscape slowly passing by outside. The day broke with palm trees silhouetted in front of a pale red sky, and soon misty fields were just barely visible through the very dirty train windows. With every tiny station we stopped at, more and more of the lush rural landscape came into view.

After boarding the train, it didn’t take long before the only under-30-year-old male passengers were sitting beside me chatting me up en espanol. One was a police officer and one was a conductor (formerly of the very train we happened to be on). Eventually the conductor went off to the other car of the train, so for the first few hours of the journey I was chatted up by the police officer who left me with his phone number and a love note written on the outside of the train window. About half way through the ride my motion sickness was starting to kick in as the train rocked from side to side more like it was a boat in rough water than a dinky little train on an electric track. The not faint enough odor of urine didn’t help matters in this department and the fact that the seats were entirely devoid of any padding made the rocking that much more painful – but despite all this it was a remarkably relaxing ride. There is something about train travel that is just so much better than a bus. For the second half of the ride I was joined by the former conductor who was far less chatty than his police officer friend and after trying unsuccessfully to get me to tell him exactly where I was staying, he left rather abruptly when we reached Matanzas (our final destination) without offering any kind of proposal or even a phone number.

The Hershey Train at Dawn

Declaration of love on a dirty train window

Cuban countryside in predawn mist out the Hershey train window

inside the train car

My massive pile of stuff (and the reason I didn't travel much in Cuba)

At the station in Matanzas there was nary a cab to be found – so the station master called my casa to see about getting me a ride. About 15 minutes later I was safely checked in and reading up on this lazy little town in my not so trusty lonely planet – which informed me that there was not much to do here – and especially not much shopping to speak of – but clearly whoever wrote this chapter of the book did not wander very far, because from what I could tell the only thing to do here is shop – there were more stores in a four block radius than I encountered in the whole of Havana. I popped into the first one I could find that didn’t require you to check in your bag, just to peruse and I came out with a charming 5 peso base ball hand made of recycled materials. Feeling absolutely at my wits end with respect to the constant male commentary on the street, and having been followed by a particularly persistent and pushy crazy man on a bicycle, I didn’t stay out for long. I went back to my casa for dinner and a bit of descansa and then I heard a symphony of drums coming from some unknown location. I ventured out again in search of the show – which of course was nowhere to be found – and so I went home to catch up on the sleep I’d lost the night before – serenaded by the occasional wave of sound blowing in from the drumming show – from who knows were.

Che mosaic in Matanzas

Elderly bicycle flower seller in front of a pink wall

The next day was Easter Sunday and I have to admit it is the most tranquil Easter Sunday I have ever experienced. I went to church in an ancient, very small and very simple wooden chapel next door to the ancient cathedral which, if it were open, would be depressingly empty since there don’t seem to be many Church goers in Cuba. I pondered what the contrast might be between Easter here and Easter in Nicaragua where nearly everyone is religious and Easter is the biggest event of the year. At any rate, I went to church – checked out a little craft market happening on the other side of the cathedral, bought some chicken-shaped pot holders, pondered buying some leather sandals, wandered down to the water in the wind, wandered back up through town, sat in the park, got chatted up by a young Santarian fellow all dressed in white who wanted to be my Spanish teacher and my salsa teacher and who hoped he would find a girlfriend just like me, I phoned home, bought some fiesta cola (cuba’s version of coke) in order to make a Cuba libre (rum and coke), bought six buns for 5 pesos, bought some water, and went back to my casa.

Easter Sunday Mass

At the present moment, I am “enjoying” the sounds of what is apparently the cheesiest Karaoke soundtrack ever made, complete with loud, obnoxious, obnoxiously drunk audience and very bad, very drunk vocalists. This concert, unlike the drumming show from last night, is very conveniently located right outside my window, and I hope since they started at about 5pm, they will finish by the time I want to go to bed. I have just finished my second Cuba libre and may have to go for a third if the music does not stop soon. Did I mention that Cuba had driven me to drink – and not just drink, but drink alone, not that I’ve developed an alcohol problem, I just haven’t met anyone here to drink with. It also helps that the rum is pretty good – though not as good as the Nicaraguan stuff.

In addition to the rum, I have developed several “bad” habits here that I will have to break when I go home including but not limited to: drinking a lot of coffee, consuming vast amounts of delicious tropical fruits, consuming vast amounts of fried foods, consuming vast amounts of very greasy foods, eating too much ice cream (though nowhere near as much as the Cubans eat) and last but not least listening to too much cheesy Latin American techno-pop (though that is entirely out of my control since it is just constantly going on somewhere in the background of my goings on – the problem is I’ve actually started to like it). It will be very hard to go back to my strictly oatmeal breakfasts and almost entirely grease, caffeine and alcohol free diet – hopefully I will be able to acquire a Daddy Yankee CD before I go home – and that will help alleviate the Latin American withdrawal symptoms.

And on that happy note, it looks like I have finally caught up with my travel blog – and hopefully very soon I will be uploading this for all my adoring readers to enjoy. Asta Luego

Chapter 23: In the waiting line

The next day I wake up and eat a delicious breakfast of Nicaraguan pinolillo, Nicaraguan coffee and Cuban fruit. Then I wander off to the bank to quickly withdraw some money – only to find that this time the line is longer than ever, filling the inside of the bank and the sidewalk outside and it is after 10am and sweltering hot, I ask for the “ultimo persona” in line, wait for someone to get in line after me, and then go and tuck myself in to a thin slice of shade beside the building. When I finally got into the building and had a seat, I took the opportunity to pull out my Spanish notebook and practice my long neglected verb conjugations. With the noise of the aircon, and the traffic outside and all the people milling about, I did not feel shy about practicing half out loud and so my hour in line went by almost quickly. Cubans seem to spend quite a lot of time waiting in absurdly long lines. They wait in line at the bank, at the money changing kiosk, outside of grocery stores, inside of grocery stores, to pay phone bills, to buy phone cards, they even wait in line for ice cream – and we are not talking just normal lines – we are talking amusement park caliber lines if you know what I mean – like stand around in the sun for an hour sweating outside the ice cream shop just to get in another line to get seated at a table to get a bowl of ice cream, and usually there are only two or three flavors to choose from – and there might be five different lines to choose from as well – and each of those lines might have access to different flavors of ice cream and by the time you walk around the block to find the line with the flavor you want – another 20 people have already got in line in front of you. The funny part is that while people really do seem aghast when they happen upon a long line, they seem rather patient in the process of waiting. The odd time I have seen a Cuban in a hurry in a line up they have certainly stuck out like sore thumbs amongst a sea of more or less very calm line waiters.

At the bank, I asked the guy in front of me how long he figured it would take and he just shrugged and said who knows. When I finally got through the line, I ran a few more errands before heading home for some lunch and laundry and packing. I went for one last walk around the city that evening with a stop at the internet kiosk to very happily find that luck had finally decided to agree with me – with the help of my dad pestering Air Canada until they agreed to change my ticket. So I happily finished my cooking and packing and everything at my Havana Casa, and was bid farewell by Cari bright and early at 5am the next morning.

Chapter 22: Settling In – and getting around

Comfortable in my decision to take an unplanned stop in la belle province, I wandered around old Havana the next day (for the second time) to try to find a nice place for my padres to stay. I luckily got a reservation at apparently the only casa in that part of town on with proper windows, and felt a wave of relief and freedom wash over me. I reflected on how this trip had been quite a roller coaster of stresses and reliefs and felt quite content in having weathered what I thought was the final uphill struggle.

I spent a leisurely afternoon in the picturesque old town; drank a ricisimo hot chocolate at the museum of chocolate, took in a few lofty views of the city, badly twisted my ankle in a pot hole full of horse piss, sat myself down on a restaurant patio over a beautiful little square, ate some fried platanos covered in lots of garlic, sat in the sun on the steps of the square for half an hour and finally hobbled back to my hood with a stinky foot along the ocean front malecon at sunset with the accompaniment of a little more than the usual flattery and cat calling from the groups of young men that had congregated at the seaside for some twilight drinks. About half way home a handsome young cubano got down on one knee asking the “princess” to run away with him. When I got home I had a luxurious hot shower and had almost settled down to a stress-free evening when my dad phoned to inform me that Air Canada had changed its mind and that my ticket could not be changed after all – and I would either have to come directly home without my week long layover or stay the course in Cuba – and as lovely as my day had been I still did not want to stay the course as my flattery bank was by now completely full and the overflow was beginning to cause some problems in the mental health department.

Old Havana

I have not yet managed to quite fit in with the local crowd, despite my tan (although I was actually mistaken for a Cubana the other day – much to my delight – but I was quickly discovered when I was unable to answer a question posed to me in Spanish) and I find the society in Havana to be equal parts kindness and helpfulness and equal parts hostility and desperation– the latter makes me think I will never feel comfortable here while the former makes me feel warm and fuzzy and safe and looked after. I have been helped here by the locals on so many occasions it is hard to count – if I stop at a bus stop to ask if the bus that stops there goes my way they will not only confirm that I am at the right stop –but they will also make sure I don’t pay too much, make sure I get on the bus and even make sure I get off at the right stop.

On the crowded public bus the other day, a young guy gave up his seat for me and he and the lady next to me chatted with me the whole time, made sure I got the closest stop to my house, told me to be careful walking at night, and sent me on my way with her phone number and an invitation to call any time. In fact most of my good-will stories involve public transit and I’m convinced that though the guide books say not to go near it, that the bus is actually the best way to travel in this city – provided you’re not in much of a hurry. This is also the cheapest way to get around the city (aside from walking) – costing literally only a few cents.

The most expensive way to get around the city is by a tourist taxi which unless you make them use their meter charge an exorbitant amount of money, I was charged $4 to move casas the first time and I was only going about 6 blocks down the road.
The second most expensive way is to go in an old and run down but still official taxi where you can usually bargain a fare down to a reasonable rate of say 2 CUCs (basically 2 dollars) for what would take an hour to walk.

The second cheapest way to get around is in the old 1950’s giant American cars, some of which are in alarmingly good shape and others which are just downright alarming. These cost either 10 or 20 pesos (50 cents to a dollar) to get you about anywhere a tourist would like to go in this city. Once inside any of these brightly colored automobiles, you feel like you have stepped back into a 1950’s gangster flick – but upfront, instead of two pinstriped gangsters in fedoras, you have one or two Hispanic muchachos, in uber-chic sunglasses and varying amounts of bling. Though they clearly are not from another era they will greet you and usher you in and out of the vehicle with all the laid back cool distancia that you would expect from a 1950s gangster. They are not allowed to pick up tourists so you have to either rely on your feminine whiles or your authentic Cuban looks and language skills– since I have neither of the later I’ll have to assume that it was my elegant silhouette gesturing at the side of the road that got me my half dozen rides in these antique vehicles. If you are lucky enough to have one pull over for you – the harder task is yet to come; you still have to be going in the right direction, and if they did somehow mistake you for a Cuban when they decided to pull over, you have to know how to say where you are going in a very specific way – like a secret password that if you know it they will probably give you a ride whether or not they have realized by this point that you are clearly a foreigner. So with all that explanation it is actually quite a challenge to get a ride in a non-tourist taxi in this city.

Classic car taxis taking a brake in old Havana

When I got my first ride I was feeling pretty gangster-cool myself until my idealistic vision of my wholesome Cuban taxi driver was shattered at the sight of a condom wrapper beside me in the back seat. On my second or third ride I got sandwiched in to the middle front seat and got quite the work out trying to keep my leg from being burnt on something under the car that had clearly long lost whatever protective insulation it once had. By the end of my second week in the city, and after a few slightly traumatically unsuccessful ride catching attempts (one in the midst of a TORENTIAL down pour and one involving a belligerent and extortionate driver), I had had just about enough of Havana taxis and resigned myself to walking and taking the bus, two far more economical options and healthier as well.

But, back to the goodness and kindness business - this part of Cuba shines clearly through at my casa where Cari now refers to me as “mi illa” (meaning my daughter or my girl– which is apparently a very common term of endearment here) and I feel enveloped in the care of two very nice elderly ladies who go out of their way to make me feel at home. So tonight I go off to bed with giant question marks dancing in my head about when to go back home, and how long to stay here and what the heck I’m going to do here if I stay – and why the heck would I want to leave this beautiful Caribbean island a week early anyway…

Chapter 21: Moving again

Food situation sorted out, I settled into my new casa – in a beautiful old home with super high ceilings, a patio and a big bright window that let in an almost steady stream of diesel fumes from a pretty side street that also apparently doubled as an ad-hock bus terminal. I lamented a short while on my poor luck with housing choices but decided to stick it out and accept the foibles as all being part of an authentic taste of Cuba. In my new casa – there were three generations of family living in the house –a couple in their 70-80s who owned the house –their daughter (who managed to room rentals) and their daughter’s daughter who lived upstairs with her fiancé. Occasionally a fourth generation (consisting of a 5 year old boy) popped in for babysitting and a 70 something year old substantial black woman –who always dressed in white and wore a rosary or two around her neck and all kinds of other religious jewelry - who was “like a sister” to the home owners, came over every day from across town to help with stuff around the house.

The lady of the house Carey and her “sister”/housekeeper Faila turned out to be great company. We spent a great deal of time in their kitchen together since I was cooking for myself and they were cooking for themselves. I asked Carey if she minded having foreigners around her house all the time and she said it didn’t bother her, but that it was a necessity and that you really don’t get any privacy. Then I asked her if she minded sharing her kitchen, and she said that guests almost never cook for themselves and she didn’t mind once in a while. So from then on I tried to be a bit more of a ghost in the kitchen, which can be a challenge when you are on a similar eating schedule, but we were on pretty friendly terms after a day or two and everything felt a-ok.

In all this time I managed to do nothing much at all with my time in Havana. I took a dance class, and took in an outdoor afro-Cuban music and dance performance which was amazingly cool – first with an hour of afro-Cuban traditional type dance with costumes and all, then an intermission, then all the traditional dancers and musicians came out in street clothes, complete with bling and sunglasses and alligator shoes and treated us to about 2 hours of Rumba performance – by the last half hour of the show, all the locals in the audience (about 90% of the people) were out on the floor rumbaing themselves – so the traditional folk performance somehow morphed into a giant dance party. I did a lot of waking around the Vedado area (where I was living) which is full of amazingly cool buildings, ice-cream shops, movie theaters, food markets and other cultural type things – but which is not the central attraction of this city by any means.

Traditonal Afro Cuban Dance Performance

Pimped out afrocuban rumba performance

Afrocubans having dance party following the traditional afrocuban dance performance - they definitely know how to move in Cuba

Me and John Lennon

Copellia icecream parlor - though parlor is absolutely not the right word - more like icecream complex - this is only about 1/100th of the seating capacity.

heading upstairs for more icecream at Copelia

an artistic photo of some weeds infront of the ocean

Fancy hotel in Vedado neighborhood

Patriotic photo of cuban flag from the grounds of the fancy Vedado hotel.

view of the Malecon from the top of one of the less swanky hotels in town

Inside the courtyard of a building at the University of Havana in Vedado

I took several excursions to the big agromercado which is always bustling with people and all manner of fruit and veg and beans and snacky things. I scoped out some of the cool fancy hotels with their various period type décor – I snuck up to the top of one and landed on a deserted executive floor with a balcony giving an excellent lofty view of the city. I wandered the Malecon – the seawall/highway that runs the length of the city. I cooked quite a lot – and I spent a LOT of time in the lobby of the swank Melia Cohiba Hotel down the road from my casa – using the internet and trying to wrap my head around how I was going to deal with the fact that I’d just been laid off from the job I thought I was coming home to.

I found this out on the very day that I discovered the ability to freely connect to the internet unhindered by a 10 year old computer running only internet explorer - one minute I was filled with the joy of being able to connect with the outside world, and the next I was filled with a kind of dull shock at reading that I was no longer going home to an assured income – so this put a little jar in my plans and stacked atop of a few days of enduring a few too many cat calls, I made up my mind to head for my homeland a little earlier than planned. But I wasn’t about to leave then and there, especially since my parents had decided to come down to Cuba the following week, so I decided to leave the day after my parents and take a week long stopover in Toronto from whence I would go to Montreal for a week and then return home.