There was a nice and friendly and affordable and tasty place to eat right across the street. That was good since the hotel's restaurant was closed! The only problem was that we are in the middle of a block so to cross the very busy 6 lanes of traffic, we had to walk to the corner cross walk and back. So, while Latin Cafe 2000 was right across the street we had to walk a block to get there and back. We had looked at the menu online but when we got there the waiter pointed out the 2 for $20 menu on the back and recommended it. We all chose it. Clay got house salad and pork chimichurri. I got Greek style white bean soup (I don't like that) and chicken chimichurri. Clay got black beans and rice mixed with fried sweet plantains as his 2 sides. I got white rice and black beans as mine. It was a huge amount of food. Judy got salad, black beans and white rice with some kind of grilled chicken and Mom got malanga soup, mixed black beans and rice and fufu with vaca frita de pollo. Mom got the prize for most adventurous. She also might have had the best though it was all good. You could add a flan, rice pudding or bread pudding for $1.99 or any other for $3.99. They had a flan and we shared churros with dulce de leche dipping sauce. Oh, and I forgot that they brought out a basket of warm buttered flattened Cuban bread to start. It was a huge amount of food and all very good and very reasonably priced.
I will post this before the meeting and maybe try to come back and update with any important meeting information before we leave here because we are told we will have no Internet in Cuba. So, I'll keep notes and post all about it on our return.
So the only thing we heard at the meeting which was new and unexpected was the 5% surcharge to convert Euros to CUC. Our pre-trip documents had spelled out pretty clearly that only US Dollars had a 10% Cuban government penalty charge to convert to CUC. The woman at the meeting tonight said that and that Euros would have a 5% charge. She also told us we would not have time to exchange money at the airport contrary to the pretrip docs. She told us to change money to CUC after we arrived at the hotel. She said that we would depart this hotel at 9am as a group for a group checkin to ABC charters of an American Airlines flight that will depart at noon. We should arrive at 1pm. After we pass customs, immigration and a health screen we will pick up luggage and be bused to Havana. We will have lunch and an afternoon walking tour before going to the Hotel Nacional to checkin and exchange money. We were advised to make reservations for anything we want to do in our post-4pm free time that first afternoon as everything is booked far out. She said there were no hotel rooms unreserved in Havana for the entire year of 2016! We only have one night free for dinner and we haven't thought about where to eat, hoping to find somewhere within walking distance! More later...
