ideas for cheap stuff

Hola de Habana!

¿Como estas? Everything here is going well, apart from our plane being an hour late, our taxi dropping us at the wrong address, the wonderful family from the apartment we entered bringing us to the right street, but to the house of someone they were touting for, getting to our original destination and finding Cuba a lot more expensive than we had prepared ourselves for…its all fantastic!

No really, everything is great. We have had our share of adventures since landing though I ran ahead of myself. Madrid was uneventful, unfortunately we had no time whatsoever to meet my friends Sergio and Sofi who live there so we’ve vowed to return. The reason we were delayed in leaving is that 2 people who were supposed to be flying to New York were on our plane, and so were their bags(!!?) Customs was a lot less painful then we feared, baggage claim took a while, we could change money, haggled a price to our casa particulares (home stay with a family) in Vedado a La Habana and were set to sleep. Taxi driver dropped as the right number but on the wrong street. He dropped us on street 15 in Vedado, not 19, so we were somewhat worried about how to resolve all this. We approached a family in one of the apartments, and despite our horrific combined Spanish, we spoke at length (would´ve been shorter conversation if we´d been able to speak properly of course), and they helpfully offered to walk us around to street 19 (it was dark and we were somewhat disorientated). However, something was obviously lost in translation in that I thought we´d agreed that the husband Vincent would walk us around to the correct address, but he left us at another casa particulares on the same street, which would´ve been fine as it was a lovely house, the family were really nice, it cost the exact same and we wanted to sleep, except that since Tongie had given her creditcard I was afraid they´d charge to it, and even if we went to the other house in the morning, we´d be expected to pay the full amount there anyway. So after I´d spoken, again at length and with great difficulty to the señora de casa, she rang the place we´d booked and they walked down to get us…phew!

Today we got up late, showered, and walked all the way through Vedado, Centro Habana to La Habana Vieja (old Havana: it´s a UNESCO Heritage site you know!), which took about 4 hours. We stopped in the Hotel Nacionale, a beautiful art deco hotel with a majorly fabulous air conditioning system , listened to some fantastic in houses, street corners, plazas, and found O´Reilly street and café! Yep, plenty of pictures taken! No idea if it´ll be possible to put them up anytime, the net here and computers are slow, however, so much cheaper than at least a 4 Euro per minute, minimum, to call home. Sorry Pops, you won´t be hearing from me here! Tongie´s definitely enjoying herself. She´s been acclimatising and making friends via this fact as, due to her Irish heritage, she had lovely rosy red cheeks this afternoon and everyone that passed kept stopping her to look, point it out to her, sympathise, and laugh! Ah the sheer amusement these people get out of us tourists! I must stress now though, that she is a lovely normal shade.

I won´t be on the net much probably, expense and it being a pain in the backside may dent my blogging fervour, however, I will keep a log of all the excellent stories that come along! We already had one on the way to find the internet in the Florida hotel we are currently in by going up in the wrong elevator and gettting stuck on the roof when we got off at the third floor as directed but when we figured out we were in the wrong place we were unfortunately stranded as the button didn´t work. Therefore, Therese in her ever ladylike manner, ended up shouting down through the roof for help from a señor. I´m sure I´ll have some tonight as we´re hopefully meeting a Cuban friend of mine from CouchSurfing David in Vedado, just have to figure out how to use the pay phones…