Cuba - Day 2 - The Tide has Turned

After a good night of sleep, I was the first into the shower.  I was mentally prepared that it would probably be a cold trickle.  Wasn't I surprised to have a fairly well pressurized hot shower!!!  Of course in the middle of it, the power went out and I stood there in the pitch black yelling for Damon to get a flashlight, which thank goodness we brought.   Power was back within 5-10 minutes and all was good.  We were provided with a grand total of two towels, each only slightly larger than a hand towel – but they got the job done.

We had asked to include breakfast, so at the designated time, our host and his mother came over to cook us breakfast for 10 CUC.  The mother had two bags of stuff from which she was able to whip up the most amazing breakfast.  In one tiny little frying pan, she made fried eggs, fried plantains, fried tomatoes, and toast. 

Yes, she made toast in a frying pan.  Plus amazing Cuban coffee, fresh squeezed papaya juice, sliced cheese and fresh pineapple.

Again, they took huge pride in being able to put on such a nice spread – we couldn’t come close to finishing it all.  Our host chatted with us in moderately decent English - he said they all had heard of Chicago as the Windy City!

I said to Damon this morning that having been here for only 24 hours, I already feel guilty about the level of waste we as typical Americans tend to generate.  Here, there isn't much so you don't use much.  Again, the toilet paper.  I needed to blow my nose last night but didn't want to waste the toilet paper.  I also realized just how much I rely on paper towels and napkins - they just don't have access here.  So many times I went to reach for a napkin or toilet paper or a paper towel and realized that I couldn’t.  We definitely made good use of our little bath towels.  Maybe the only exception to waste is bottled water, which there is in abundance.  We cannot drink the water so we are always on the lookout for bottled water.  Luckily I brought a camelback and filled in in the airport so we have a decent supply of cheap teeth brushing water which we ration in little cups.

After breakfast, we needed a taxi to get to our next Casa.  Our host said he would call his friend who had a taxi - everyone in Havana has a friend who does something to make money!  So the friend shows up in a "car" - and I use the word car lightly because it was more of a prehistoric shell of what may have once been a car.  The car doors had no internal panels - basically just the outside metal - you could see the entire window go up and down.  Somehow the window roller survived. 

The floor of the car had some holes - small - but you could see the ground.   Our host asked if we would mind if he came, too - of course not!  It seems as though the locals take advantage of taxi rides when they can get them as there always seems to be extra people in the cars with us.  And off we went in the Flintstone mobile.  We dropped off our host a few minutes later and kept going.

When we got to our second Casa in the neighborhood of Vedado, we found a beautifully restored Colonial house that was absolutely HUGE; of course, we were greeted by a locked gate. We forgot to take a picture, so I found this stock photo.

We were a few hours early and no one was expecting us.  We basically stood there looking like idiots until the housekeeper finally noticed and let us in.  Our room “the Red Room” was fantastic!  It had a tiny little living room and kitchen with a mini fridge, bar and bar stools, bottled water (yay)

and then a staircase up to a bedroom with a giant bed and full bathroom – unfortunately for Damon, the bathroom ceiling height was only about 6’2.  Damon is 6’4”. 

Everything was new, clean and comfortable and we had normal sized bath towels, a FULL roll of toilet paper (but no obvious spares), shampoo, soap and a hand towel.  What???  It's the freaking Four Seasons!  All of this for $40 per night.

After settling in, we left to check out the neighborhood - it was raining.  Oh well.  We just got wet.  We found a giant marble monument in the middle of a huge roundabout that looked interesting so we climbed up a bunch of steps it to check it out and get some shelter. 

I have no idea what it was as nothing is really marked with informational plaques.  Damon got up the stairs first and warned me not to come up, but it was raining and I wanted a shelter.  Sadly, upon further exploration this massive marble monument seemed to be some sort of  makeshift toilet and had human poop all over, I have dubbed it the Poop Palace.  It does make a great reference point since it is easy to find our Casa once we find the Palace.  Yes, a little gross, but we are just taking it all in in stride.  We left the Poop Palace to find a taxi to take us to "Havana Vieja" or, Old Havana – this is the main tourist area that we had discovered last night (albeit we had just hit the edge of it).  We hailed a taxi, which, not surprisingly had a random person along for the ride. This time we only paid 10 CUC for the ride.  We are getting better as the Coco cab set us back 12 CUC the night before – but since it was raining, I opted not to further hone my negotiation skills.  We headed for the Museo de Revolucion (Revolution Museum), and waited in line for a few minutes but eventually gave up since nothing was moving (NOTE:  don’t go to museums on Tuesdays when the cruise ships arrive).  We started wandering and found a place for lunch - it had motorcycles lined up in front and Damon got all excited, so we had to go in.

We ate a great (huge) lunch - lobster for 14 CUC and an awesome grilled chicken sandwich for 3 CUC.  And an enormous strawberry mojito that made me stagger a bit on the way out.

And here is where things started to turn around in a big way.  Old Havana is absolutely amazing.  Tiny tiny streets - maybe the width of one car.  Most streets are cobblestone.  If you've ever been to the French quarter in New Orleans, just squish it even closer together and that is old Havana. In searching our pictures, I cannot find any good pictures of the streets - at least ones where I'm not walking through the middle with a goofy look on my face, so you'll have to take my word for how awesome it was.

Every now and then the streets will open to a giant square or park with monuments or churches or hotels or cafes. 

Our favorite plaza had a giant bronze statue of a naked lady in high heels riding a chicken while holding a giant fork.  The only explanation we got was that it was a famous Cuban artist who always does something with chickens.

We just walked the streets for several hours with no plan - if something looked interesting, we just went there, definitely my favorite place so far. 

The buildings lining the streets are wall to wall with no space between and so many of them are painted in bright and pastel colors.  It is hard to tell if they are occupied or not but many seem to be residences.  Many of the doorways are open and people stand at the base of the stairway and sell souvenirs that are hung up and down the staircase.  Some have pizza or other food, or water, or ice cream or computer repair or haircuts. 

Everyone is trying to sell something from the bottom of their staircases.  You look in some buildings and there is just debris and the next one has someone watching tv.  Very hard to visualize without seeing it.  While many of the buildings in Old Havana are being renovated or have been renovated, there is still a huge number of buildings falling down in disrepair and it changes from one block to the next.  The “main” drag (Obispo Street) is the most rehabbed and most buildings are rehabbed.  The farther you get from where the tourists frequent, and the more residential a street might be, the more run down it is likely to be.  Amazingly, whether it was day or night, or whether the streets were crowded or empty, there was never a moment that we felt unsafe – despite how run down an area looked.

We did walk in and out of a cafes and restaurants, usually because I had to go to the bathroom; plus, we drank coffee like 5x a day since they are mainly just little shots. 

Damon was especially taken with a place called O’Reilly’s Café on O’Reilly Street. 

I would love to have seen the owner – a red-headed Cuban?  It was a cute coffee shop/restaurant with a nice bathroom upstairs (lady out front, no toilet paper).  Oh, and another funny thing about the restaurants – while mojitos and beer are common, it is also possible to get pop – occasionally you see Coke or Pepsi, but mainly they have two types of pop – “TuKola” (Coke) and a green can (I never caught the name) that is “7-up”.  And, get this – they have Red Bull.  Red Bull was stocked in every refrigerated case I saw.  How strange is that??  We found this little bread shop/bakery and went to check it out – as was typical, the cases were about 80% empty, but we saw frosted brownies.  For $.40 each.  They were delicious.

There are four forts lining the entry into Havana’s harbor that were built to protect the city, which was a major port for pretty much everything coming and going anywhere.  Damon and I consider ourselves experts as we have been watching Black Sails about pirates in Nassau & Cuba around this time.  We did tour one of the forts which was back a bit from the mouth of the ocean – they had some pirate history and some fake treasure; but since everything is typically written in Spanish, we couldn’t really figure much out.

We wanted to hire a convertible “classic car” for the next day but didn’t know how to go about it.  As we were walking, I happened to catch the eye of a guy driving a turquoise and white convertible ’51 Chevy.  He saw me looking and stopped in the middle of the street and waited for us to walk over – and that was how we met Yasiel.  Our only requirements had been – convertible, old car, and speaks English.  I swapped out English for “he was really cute”.  In broken Spanglish, we gave him our address and the time to pick us up the next day and I was pretty sure we negotiated a price for 4 hours of taking us to all of the popular sites.  Only time would tell.

Thoroughly pleased with ourselves for making plans for the following day, we made our way to a restaurant for dinner and in another interesting bathroom experience, the hand soap there was from Bath & Body Works “Dark Kiss” – I wondered whether they have black market foaming hand soap, or if tourists just leave things and they use what they can find.  Given that this restaurant had a famous chef, I’m guessing it was black market.  One other quirky thing we noticed in restaurants – they may not provide napkins, but we regularly got a little shaker of toothpicks.  Sort of like a round tic-tac container where you turn it over and shake until one toothpick falls out of a little hole.  What they have in abundance can be strange.  We left the restaurant in search of more dessert.  People warned us that the food was mediocre at best.  We have been really enjoyed every restaurant and bakery we have found so far.  Old Havana at night is a lot of live music both in restaurants and on the street.  We found our dulces and eventually headed home exhausted.  Note – taxi negotiation skills improving… only paid $8 to get home vs $12 from the same taxi stand the night before!!!

A few post scripts from the day…

We weren’t sure how easy it would be to find people who speak English.  I would say most people spoke as much English as we spoke Spanish – which was not much.  Luckily, we had downloaded a translator before leaving which saved us regularly, to the extent we could piece together a sentence that did not lose anything in the translation, we regularly tried to engage people in conversations.  Usually they looked at us like – what the #)$@ are these two morons trying to say.  But it was fun.  Most of the time we all just nodded our heads, smiled, laughed and said “yes”.  Plus, we knew the basics – taxi, chicken, bathroom, mojito and numbers to get us home.  That was enough.

I would be remiss in not spending some time talking about cars and animals.  Everyone has heard about the old cars in Cuba.  You think you can visualize what people are talking about but I assure you, nothing is like being there.  I had heard things like “time warp”; “It is like time stopped in the 50’s”.  That just doesn’t cut it.  The old cars – they are everywhere.  It is not just a few of them – there are thousands.  My best guess is that cars from the 50’s make up roughly half or more than half of the cars on the road.  Some are kept in good shape and some are barely hanging on.  One might assume that they are held together with band aids and duct tape, but I can assure you that the Cubans have access to neither of those things.  The cars are fantastic regardless of their level of repair.  They come in every color imaginable, no dents, always clean on the inside (we’ve noticed that Cubans take tremendous pride in everything and see people washing cars all the time).  Every make and model imaginable is on the road and the drivers always proudly say the make and year of the car.  Many of the cars have parts from other make/models – they use whatever they can get.  A Ford with a Fiat or Mercedes steering wheel, a Hyundai engine (all engines are swapped out for diesel), a Chevy gear shift.  Seeing them all on the road is pretty cool.  In addition to the “classic cars”, there is a whole other set of cars from the 70’s – these are pretty ugly as was most stuff from the 70’s.  Very boxy – mostly Fiat Lado (I think that is right).  They make up many of the government taxi’s and people don’t seem to care as much about these but they do charge less to drive you around than a classic car.  The smallest percentage of cars would be the modern cars – yes, they have modern cars – we think mostly from china.  But they are there – maybe 25% of the cars on the road.  Mainly taxis and mainly government own.  And mainly boring.  You want to see the cars - here is just a sampling from this one day... and yes, there is an actual Edsel towards the bottom.

Now for the animals – one thing I was completely unprepared for was the feral animals.  Dogs and cats roam the streets freely and you cannot walk down a street anywhere without seeing the dogs; cats hide more, but they are there.  The dogs are not aggressive, they don’t beg, they just wander around everywhere.  As a crazy dog lover, it was really hard for me to see – the dogs were dirty and probably had bugs so I couldn’t bring myself to touch any of them – but it did break my heart to see them.  And any female we saw very obviously had puppies somewhere so they were always out looking for food.  I’m not talking about seeing 3 or 4 dogs a day – I think we would easily saw over 100 feral dogs on any given day.

Teaser:  Day 3 is where we really start engaging with the locals and learning more about the people.  And what incredible stories they have.