Hello from Cuba (1) - First Impressions

Thanks to a severe case of the Revenge of Montezuma (or Ricky Ricardo?..,) I am sitting here in the Hotel Havana Libre and I finally get around to create updates from my first 4.5 days here in Cuba. The Internet connection is definitely the slowest I have ever seen in my entire life, (15 minutes to access my messages at Yahoo..), but I am giving it a shot anyways.

Friday morning I arrived at the airport in Toronto at 5:30 am since my husband gave me a ride before work. The plane was scheduled to leave at 10:30 and several transfers with public transport would have taken me 2.5 hours anyway, so I decided to head there early and read a book.

Air Canada was delayed after all (due to a problem with the water supply on the plane) and we had to wait for a substitute plane from Winnipeg and finally got off the ground at about noon. 3.5 hours later we arrived at the airport Jose Marti in Havana - a reasonably modern airport. However, it took me and the other travellers almost 2 hours to collect our luggage and finally hop into a taxi.

On the way in from the airport I noticed that there was a mixture of industrial developments and agricultural areas, right up until the centre of the city, which is strange compared to Toronto, where there is no significant agriculture until way outside the city. The older gentleman driving the taxi was very friendly and explained a few basic things to me, e.g. that most of the area is industrial and agricultural. He also showed the National Sports Centre to me. Of course you see old cars from the 50s and earlier as well as beat-up Russian Ladas everywhere. Old sidecar motorcycles are also a popular way to get around.

I finally arrived at my hotel at about 6 pm where my brand-new friend Pedro (a connection through a friend in Canada) was waiting for me. I had told my friend that I wanted to really spend some time with locals to learn about Cuba, its customs, its way of life etc.

Pedro is a brown-skinned black man in his late thirties with a common-law wife and a young daughter. An extremely nice person and he