Cuba Diary, Part 3 of 5
Enjoying Havana
Saturday, 26 February 2011
When I was returning from my morning run, I saw that the door was open at the apartment directly beneath Rafael’s, with both Markus and Remo eating breakfast at the dining room table.
It is also a casa particular, and Maria Elena, the hostess there, makes breakfast, whereas Rafael does not.
I went upstairs to shower and then came down to join them for breakfast.
When I saw Rafael, I asked him if it would be possible to change rooms after Markus and Remo leave on Sunday; he said that it would be possible. It will be so much better being in a room that does not face the street.
After breakfast, I finally ventured outside to get familiar with the surroundings. We are very close to the center of Havana and Old Havana. In that regard, it is an excellent location.
I took a look at my map, but also decided that I would simply go where my legs took me. There are some gorgeous hotels here and I entered several of them, including the Hotel Inglaterra, Hotel New York, Hotel Florida, and the Hotel Ambos Mundos, where Ernest Hemingway stayed off and on for several years
I also got to see the Plaza de Armas and the Catedral de San Cristobal de la Habana. I had an enjoyable time walking around in the sunlight with a nice breeze and looking at pleasant surroundings. There were lots of old cars. Personally, I don’t care about those, but I know several people who do, so I took copious amounts of photos for friends and for display on my photo-sharing site.
On my way back to Rafael’s place, I noticed the Hotel Parque Central and walked in there, just for the heck of it. Good thing I did! I saw a foreigner sitting at a table with a laptop, and he seemed to be connected to the Internet.
I asked him about it, and he said, yes, he was online, and that he had purchased a wifi Internet card at the hotel business center. (I had seen people on wifi at the posh hotel in Trinidad, but in that hotel, you could only connect to wifi if you were staying at the hotel; here, you didn’t need to be a customer to be able to get online.)
Once I got back to Rafael’s, it was a little after 17:00. I had originally intended to take a walk along the Paseo de Marti, where I had walked a little bit earlier in the day, but once Rafael, Markus, Remo, and I started talking, I never left the place.
It was a very sociable and convival group, which reinforced my decision to stay in a casa particular.
Sunday, 27 February 2011
After breakfast, Markus and Remo got prepared to leave. They had been riding their bicycles in Cuba for six weeks, so they are taking their last ride: to the airport.
Once they left, I was able to change rooms. I told Rafael that there was no need to wash my bed linens, as I would simply move them to the other bed.
This room is a little smaller than the other but it is better because it has no window facing the street and it also has direct access to the bathroom I had been sharing with Markus and Remo. (The bathroom has two entrances: one from the hallway and one from the bedroom.)
There is a small window that opens up into a light well. I like having a dark room, as it makes it easier to sleep in the morning. The only disadvantage to this room is that there is a cigar smoker somewhere below, and the smoke wafts into the room via the light well. I had been able to smell it in the other room, but it was much stronger here.
No, there is no such thing as perfection, is there? Anyway, this whole country smells like tobacco smoke — particularly cigars of the stinkiest kind.
I was not quite finished moving all of my things when the next visitor arrived at Rafael’s. He’s another cyclist, named Chris, and is from London.
Before I departed for my day in town, I asked Rafael if I would be able to do some laundry in the evening, and he said that I would. He also said that I should buy my own detergent. I could do that, of course, but I found it odd that with the total of $175 that I am paying for my one week stay, he would begrudge me a half-cup of laundry detergent (of which he had plenty, as I saw the package on the kitchen counter).
On my way back to the apartment, I wandered through a neighborhood where there were no tourists. Lots of people here, as well as everywhere else I have seen in Cuba, earn some money by selling things — mostly food — from their homes. The word most frequently used for these is “cafeteria,” though they look nothing like cafeterias in the sense that we use the word.
I saw one of these places which advertised a plate of spaghetti for 10.00. The money in question could not possibly be in CUC, as that would make it much more expensive than a comparable meal in a restaurant. So I verified with the young woman at the half-open door that it was in MN. She cofirmed that it was.
With the rate being roughly 23 to 25 pesos of MN to 1 CUC, I was able to give her a one-CUC coin (worth about 89 cents US) and she gave me 13 pesos change in MN. This plate of spaghetti had cost about 43 US cents.
In the evening, when I came back, Chris and I were having some wine when Rafael handed Chris an empty laundry bag. After we spoke for a while, Chris and I went out for a walk. I asked him if Rafael had told him that he needed his own detergent. Chris said no.
Then, as we were talking about the breakfast arrangements downstairs at Maria Elena’s, Chris mentioned that it was included in the price he was paying which was 25 CUC. That really puzzled me: why is he getting breakfast included and I am not?
Monday, 28 February 2011
In the morning, Rafael told us that a cleaning lady would be coming in later in the day. That was a good idea, as the floors are especially dusty and dirty. Rafael said that the cleaning lady would do my laundry.
Chris and I decided that we would take the HabanaBus Tour of the city. It is one of those hop-on, hop-off tours that are so prevalent these days in most major cities. The price was right at 5 CUC per person for all day, 9:00 to 21:00.
When we arrived at Parque Central before 10:00, the first thing we found was that the bus was not keeping to its schedule. When one finally showed up, there was very little available space. People in the queue ahead of us filled all of the available seats.
We decided to walk around the old town a little bit. After lunch, when we returned to the bus stop at about 12:30, there was space on the bus that was sitting there.
Though we had great views everywhere we went, I didn’t like being exposed to the sun that way. I had brought an umbrella to shield myself, but the bus was traveling too fast and it was being blown around as if in a windstorm.
At one point, we decided to hop off at one of the larger supermarkets in town, only to find that it was closed because they had lost power.
We wandered around in the area for a while and eventually, when we found our way back to the supermarket, power had been restored and we were able to shop for the items we were looking for.
I had been able to find packets of peanuts and other nuts in Cienfuegos and Trinidad, but they have not been in any of the stores here. I found them in this supermarket, and they were more expensive here than they had been in those other cities.
The schedule said that the buses are spaced every half hour but we found that every time we waited for one, it was significantly longer than that. Some of the people on the bus had a map of the bus route, along with the useless schedule, but when I asked for one of those, the tour announcer told me, “No hay.” (We don’t have it.)
Most of the bus stops were not even marked with signs. It seemed like they had taken a perfectly wonderful idea and found a way to make it malfunction.
I found that the sun was very hot on the upper level. After we made our way one time around the loop, Chris got off and went back to the apartment. I decided to make a second tour, and the sun this time of the day — from about 16:30 to 18:00 — was much kinder. I was also able to take lots more photos, though taking them from a moving bus was not always easy.
It was nice to come back to a clean room and clean clothing. Inexplicably, however, the cleaning lady had thrown out two of my water bottles. Yes, they were empty, but they were on the table next to my bed, not in the wastebasket.