Mambo de la Luna: day 2+, Habana

I think it’s technically day 4, but I get confused from all the crossing of date lines, and with my body clock otherwise a bit messed around. My phone thinks it’s Saturday 6 July, my laptop thinks it’s Sunday 7 July, and my brain thinks that it’s hard to be in Havana and not drink.
But before I get to today, I should probably cover yesterday, but not the way the band at the lunch restaurant covered “Yesterday”.
The ultra long haul Singapore to Ewok, sorry, Newark (airport code EWK) was overall pretty good. I made sure to drink lots of water, so I hit the ground well hydrated if a bit dazed and tired. Flights to Cuba get their own special check-in area, which means tucked away in a dark corner of Terminal C, Level 1, past all of the baggace conveyors. Here I paid for my entry visa and checked my bag. So far, so good. Then I just had to go to the other end of the terminal, turn at the Dunkin Donuts, go up two levels and get through security.
I don’t know if Newark has quiet times, but I wasn’t there in one of them. The queues to get through security were long, slow moving, and could be better organised: they don’t tell you to take off your belt until after you’ve put everything on the scanner trays and have walked over to the body scanner, where you then have to wait for the right gendered officer to be ready to pat you down, while your stuff just sits on the other side of the xray machine.
While I’m known to enjoy the occasional tipple, EWK is a drinker’s dream: almost every eating establishment in the terminal had a well-stocked bar (the only place I noticed without was the juice bar). Want beer, bourbon, or a bloody mary for breakfast? At EWK you can. After a lap to see what breakfast options I had, I settled onto a stool at some diner-type place where you did all of your ordering on a tablet and then they bring it to you from somewhere.
Want a bloody mary for breakfast? There are almost as many options on the menu as a subway — choose your garnish, level of spiciness, or add an extra shot. Did I also mention it then comes in a pint glass? Pretty good too, it felt like what my body needed. Then it was off to kill a little time before the flight.
It seems like every flight to Cuba is interesting. I thought I had a pretty eventful/borderline flight from Hell, but it seems out of L, KDS, and me, mine was the smoothest. I felt for the cabin crew, there was only two of them against a plane full of Cuban-American families wanting to visit home, a couple of recalcitrent Japanese passengers who seemed incapable of sitting down for any length of time, and almost all of them bringing enough cabin baggage to fill an A380, so our little Embrauer 170 was never gonna do it.
Havana airport: a lot of the tourist guides talk about what to do when you land in the multi-storey terminal, sadly our flight had us stepping onto the tarmac and directed to a single-storey shed-like building. Inside is a wall of cubicles where each passenger did their immigration interview, before pushing through a door to be confronted by two luggage conveyors.
The luggage conveyor assigned to our flight, started up, lights flashed, warning bells sounded, started moving and then stopped. It probably got one look at all of huge bags and boxes were on the plane and decided it was time for an early weekend. We were then directed to the second conveyor, when I say directed we just all shuffled over to it in hope. Bags started to appear with our flight number, but slowly. I don’t know if the luggage was all xrayed behind the scenes or if it was just too hot for the baggage handlers to move with any haste, but for a while they were coming out at maybe one per minute. They were coming out slowly enough that I had remembered some Spanish — Donde esta mi maleta; No esta aqui; mi maleta es blanca y negra — well before it did appear. I also had a chat with a Cuban-American on his first visit back in 8 years, travelling with his mother who comes back every year.
Mi maleta was eventually aqui, so I wandered over to the customs person with all my papers expecting to have to answer some questions or something, but he just took the piece of paper he needed and waved me through. Welcome to Cuba.
Through the gates was quite a crowd, all waiting for family with the occasional tour guide holding a placard. I found mine, Javier, and he pointed me in the direction of the money exchange. It seems that every travel blog for Havana tells a different story of the hassles of getting currency changed, but I had no queues, no dramas. I just walked up to the booth, handed over some of my EUR and my passport, and was given some CUC in return, including the eclectically denominated 3-pesos note. For any faunlts, I have to admire any country that has a three dollar note.
The trip from the airport to Habana reminded me of other places: Pristina, Hoi An 5 years ago, Luang Prabang, Tirana, places under development where drivers are sometimes crazy, roads are a little worn in places (and this is by no means some western superiority thing, one of the main roads on my drive home from work has a tendency to resemble swiss cheese when it rains, and don’t get me started on Perth drivers), theres a mix of run down buildings by the roadside as well as patches of countryside, and that feeling of never being sure where the main city actually starts. I’m sure others have described this much better.
It wouldn’t be a blog post about Habana without mentioning old cars: Habana has a lot of old cars. I’ll talk more about this once I’ve been in one.
We had to walk a block to get to the Casa due to road works, the streets are a little rough but there are a lot of works going on because in November, Habana has its 500th birthday. Cinco hundred years since the Spanish decided to put up an outpost and do its colonial thing.
Introduced to the owner/manager, I was quickly shown all the amenities of the three room, ground floor accommodation we’ll be staying in for 3 nights. A room with a single and a double bed and fridge, a small lounge kitchenette, and a bathroom toilet. All the essentials, and enough slow-rotating ceiling fans for a Ridley Scott movie. There’s airconditioning, too.
Unpacked, I did my usual: walk further than I expected to, get myself lost, sweat a lot, and then find my way back. The older part of Habana is mostly a grid, except where it isn’t, and while the maps make it look a little maze like, there are enough big straight roads. Most roads are straight, so where the grid fails it’s because there’s a big rectangular building in the way.
I can feel that this post is dragging, getting bogged down in little things, so I’ll try to move some stuff I was going to talk about to future posts: stuff about Cuba’s double currency, the tourist/local divide, and the socioeconomic stuff in general.
Walked out, I found a restaurant bar overlooking the Plaza Vieja, where it was time for a mojito and tapas. I went with the tuna croquettes, pretty tasty and a good companion to the sugary minty rummy goodness of the mojito. Then it was back to the casa for L’s expected arrival (which, true to Cuban arrival time, was about una hora y media late) before we went back to the same tapas bar for dinner. L had the tropical chicken, which was a chicken breast, covered in ham and cheese and pineapple, while I had the beef, done in a fashion similar to stir-fry. Both were very good, though I wasn’t expecting mine to be as Chinese inspired.
That’s enough for one rambling post. Next time there will be more walking, more rum, more tourist observations, and more food.