Tuesday, January 12, 2016
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| View from our room this morning. |
Breakfast was an overwhelming affair at 7:15am. Crowded, noisy and bustling. Evidently if
you came later you couldn’t get in the hotel’s basement buffet at all. We heard people
being turned away as we exited. I commented to the guy that we had just vacated a 4-top, but as Clay pointed out if they were not turning over tables by resetting them it didn't matter how many people left! I had failed to observe that they were only busing vacated tables and not resetting them. Coffee was good though self-service and the
food was fine, properly hot and cold and abundant. Last night it was really
only abundant. I learned an enlightening fact later about Cuban hotels. They are all government owned and some like Hotel Nacional are also government operated and that meant that all the hotel employees were basically civil servants and not hospitality workers. That made a lot of sense as to the IRS cafeteria feel of the Nacional's buffet restaurant.
I hated to have to do it, but I complained after breakfast about the dinner drinks being charged extra
last night and was assured that Trish (our tour manager) had been there when
Grency (our local tour company guide) gave the drink and dinner vouchers to her
hotel contact. Grency was unwilling to do anything about this with the hotel. In effect someone got paid twice. She
said we would all get a free beverage later from her company to compensate us.
Since we were already supposed to be getting “free beverages” I don’t see how
that compensates us for money out of pocket. A credit on the hotel bill would compensate us, but that is evidently not an option. This afternoon on the bus back to the Hotel Nacional she
told us that on another day we would go to the Floridita Bar for a free daiquiri. She told us
it is the most famous bar in Cuba and a former favorite of Hemingway and the
cradle of the daiquiri.
Today we also learned that everyone else we spoke to was
bragging about their giant, ballroom sized rooms and multiple beds. No one else
is in a tiny, gritty-floored, single full-sized bed room with only 2
functioning light bulbs. Since there are dust bunnies and at 5pm housekeeping
has still not visited our room after we were out all day with our service
please sign out, I am thinking that housekeeping did not intend this room to be
rented. I did tell Trish about our room while I was complaining and she laughed but did not suggest
that a better room might be available. Trish said she always gets room 501 which is directly above Mom & Judy and identical so I guess she has no issues. As a single in a huge corner room with 3 beds, it doesn't matter if her room gets serviced or not. Thankfully, this is a short trip.
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| Judy opened that umbrella just in time! |
It was cool, windy and rainy all morning. We walked from
San Francisco Square through another square, and Plaza de Armas, where Havana was
founded and finally to Cathedral Square the newest square of Habana Viejo. At our first square Judy had a lesson in why you shouldn't stand next to a building in any city. Luckily, she had just opened her umbrella! We
had free time at each square for photos and some extra time at 2 for some
independent wandering. We loitered for quite a while at Plaza Vieja as they were trying to figure out how many tickets they needed to buy for people to attend Buena Vista Social Club on our free Wednesday night.
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| San Francisco Square |
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| Plaza Vieja |
We stopped briefly outside a ration store and Grency spoke about it briefly. We didn't go inside or get very much information really. She spoke as much about the mosque across the street. She told us there are no Muslims in Cuba. Since every citizen uses the ration stores, and there were questions you'd have thought it warranted a bit more coverage but the topic was avoided or ignored every time someone brought it up. The information I've since found online doesn't jibe with Grency's information. Go figure.
We had a shopping stop at a cigar shop. After we left we were told that they also sold Cuban rum and coffee and they had tastings too. We were herded straight back to the cigar counter and told to fight for a place before the groups ahead of us and behind us bought them out. Since I didn't enter the scrum, I saw the rum tasting only but it was being done pretty formally for the group behind ours. I didn't want any but some of our group did get some samples. I never did see any coffee for sale in there as I waited. (Sorry none of us caught the name or a photo of the exterior with a sign. However, some Googling reveals it must have been one of lots of government stores called La Casa del Habano. Evidently they had a branch in our Hotel Nacional too but we never heard about it while there. Even more strangely there was apparently also one at the Conde de Villanueve where we would later have our tasting!) It was right before we reached Plaza de Armas.
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| Fort at Plaza de Armas |
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| Site of 1st Havana Town Council |
At Plaza de Armas, Grency talked for a long while with dates and details of the founding of Havana as she had at San Francisco Square. This time while she was talking Trish tapped Clay and I and told us we should buy some peanuts from a man at the fringe of the group. He did not have a set price for his little paper packets but Clay thought he wanted a peso. Supposedly, 24 Cuban pesos equal one CUC, unless they equal 1 CUC or less. Trish told Clay to give him whatever change he had to buy some and a tip. Clay's only change was 1 CUC coins, so he gave him 2 and the man tried to give Clay more than a dozen packets. The peanuts were tasty and fresh and we all enjoyed them. Clay had them for days after but they weren't as good later.
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| Street vendor peanuts |
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| Ambos Mundos, Hemingway's home in Havana |
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| Mail slot! - Trish told us not to mail anything in a street mail box! |
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| Inside Conde de Villanueve |
We had a cigar and rum and coffee tasting at a small 18-room boutique hotel. The coffee was Serrano, the rum was Santiago and the
cigars were house made. The young man who makes them made 2 while we watched.
It was interesting. I think people purchasing would have been happier if the
order of the visits had been reversed. None of us actually tasted the cigars they handed us here! Others did but since they were house cigars I don't know if anyone regretted their prior purchases as no sales attempts were made here, strangely enough.
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| Bob at tasting |
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| Cathedral Square |
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| Inside cathedral |
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| Following Grency to lunch. |
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| We're not there yet. |
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| Lunch menu was typical of our meals |
We left Old Havana to get to Habana 61
for lunch. It was a small place and we filled it up. It was a good meal. No
live music or moldy turtle pools or birds so even better for me than yesterday.
They served a welcome mojito (that was infinitely better than yesterday’s which
looked like a houseplant rooting and did not taste of rum). Today’s absolutely
had rum and was visually appealing. Clay and Judy and a woman who joined us had
Bucanero beers again. Today in bottles instead of cans so they got more beer. I had a TuKola soda, the locally brewed Coke
equivalent. It was not too bad. I liked it. The soup was good, taro root soup
and grilled tomatoes. Main dishes were BBQ pork (very similar to yesterday’s),
beef shredded Cuban style (very bell peppery) or fish (swordfish?). Side dishes
were fried plaintain chips and mixed black beans and rice. It was good. Finally
dessert was flan or guava with cheese. All good. Coffee was offered. Sorry I am not finding any photos of the black beans and rice. Trust me they were offered at nearly every meal and I loved them every time. But, I guess since they came out after the main courses that Clay didn't pause his meal to photograph them!
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| It turns out malanga soup is taro root soup! |
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| Bucanero beer |
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| TuKola |
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| Mom's pineapple juice |
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| I had this beef dish at least 3 times. It was begging for a hot corn tortilla every time! |
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| Pork |
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| Fish |
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| Flan |
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| Guava with cheese |
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| Fort on Havana's harbor |
We learned today that the government had stopped school
visits indefinitely. We had that on the itinerary today with the cigar factory visit and had been asked to bring gifts or
donations appropriate to schools. Trish asked us to bring our donations to the
bus today. We did and Grency told us we couldn’t go to a school. This afternoon
Trish told us we would leave our donations at an eco-preserve restaurant where
we’ll have lunch tomorrow. Some people got upset and she said we’d stop at a
clinic to drop anyone’s medical supplies donations/gifts. Okay. Sometimes you just have to be flexible and go with what you get on the ground instead of what was scheduled when you booked. There was no cigar factory visit because the factories are closed for the holidays until the 17th.
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| Surf washing over seawall on Malecon |
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| Hotel Nacional's original Spanish-tiled lobby floor |
We got back to the hotel about 4:30pm or so. Our room had
not been serviced even though our service please tag was out all day long. We
have to meet in the lobby at 5:55pm to attend a lecture at 6pm in the
conference room. When we go to the talk, we are to be dressed to go to dinner at 7pm to 9:30pm as there won't be time to change in between. The
lecture is by a Cuban professor of economics and an expert on US/Cuba history
of relations. Dinner will be at a paladar as yet unnamed but not Café Laurent as
scheduled since it is closed.
The lecture was interesting and Professor Humberto Blanco
did a good job. His topic was New Cuban Economic Model. He told us these policy documents are online
in English and took effect between Oct 2010 to Apr/May 2011, but I couldn't find them by Googling. He also addressed the Cuban Foreign Investment Law.
He was very diplomatic. He answered some questions and addressed the dual-currency system and its problems.
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| We cooked dinner on hot rocks at the table |
Dinner tonight was about a half hour drive away at a very
nice and large suburban type home that was still in Vedado according to Trish. In
Playa according to Grency. Who knows? It was very dark out there! It was called
Rejoneo Asador. It was the first time either guide had been there. They did not describe
it very well. I don’t know if they didn’t understand or the paladar’s staff was
bad at explaining it to them before they translated. We were at 4 tables. Each
table was served family-style. Beginning with a series of what I would call
tapas which were brought out one at a time over an hour. The main course was served
cooked at the table on hot lava rocks. Each table got 2 rocks and 6 tiny
tasteless sauces. We had one rock for seafood and one for chicken, pork and
steak. It was not a favorite of any of us. When we’ve done hot rocks before you
only had to cook your own meal. The rocks lost too much heat to cook all the
seafood. Dessert was lemon meringue pie. We got back to the Hotel Nacional around
10pm. It has been a long day. At least it was not hot!
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| lemon meringue pie |
Our room had been serviced while we were out for dinner. I
say that. The sign had been moved to the inside doorknob from the outside one and at least our bed was made up and the tip was taken. Oh, and most
importantly our shit bucket was emptied. Clay has been obsessed about that used
toilet paper pail since we first started planning this trip and he read past
visitors’ from the USA reporting about the Nacional and those plastic bathroom
pails and their not being emptied daily. If that happened on top of the tiny,
dirty room he was going to go ballistic. The thing that stopped him marching to
the desk after our first return to the room was that there was still a maid’s
cart out in the hall after 5pm. It wasn’t much as room servicing goes, but Clay's crisis
was averted!
We leave at 8:30am tomorrow for a trip to the country side.
We are to visit Las Terrazas. More tomorrow.
