Exhausted by the pavement pounding from our first night in Cuba and also the excitement of Sunday, on Day 2 (Monday) Luxy, Ciara, and I gave our sandal-clad (espadrilles for me) feet a break. 

May 29, 2014

This is going to be a long blog post (I counted over a hundred photos) so you might want to pour yourself a drink. Make it a mojito. Havana Club rum, naturally. And fire up a Cohiba while you're at it.

A couple of Saturdays ago our long awaited trip to Cuba kicked off. Luxy, Ciara, and I spent two nights in Havana of sightseeing, then flying down to Cayo Largo Del Sur for six days and finally retuning to Havana for another night. This trip has been a long time in the making and would not have been possible without Luxy's amazing micromanaging skills (she even made a Powerpoint presentation), so muchos gracias Catarina (her new Spanish name for when we were in Cuba. Mine was Jazmín)!

All I knew about Cuba before this trip was that it is a 'socialist paradise' and practically inaccessible to most Americans. What I didn't know was that this was thanks to the embargo which also meant that internet is more or less non-existent. And here I was asking innocently 'Do they have Uber in Cuba?' Are you Havana laugh? But in all seriousness, can Cuba make 3G more widely available? Then they can start a taxi app called Cuber. *waits for applause. Gets none. Awkward*

So I flew to Paris with the girls before enduring a ten hour flight (Air France, economy class. An ordeal) to Havana to see for myself the charming communist country steeped in a history of revolution, and home to the best cigars and rum in the world. And also the catalyst for all the Che Guevara tees that years ago were so popular with clueless bros who have no idea who he is. I like it when the Cubans wear Che tees because he is their hero, but I wouldn't, because...well wouldn't it be a bit odd for my London friends to wear tees with Tunku Abdul Rahman's face on them? Who's Tunku Abdul Rahman you ask? Exactly my point.

We checked into our charming B&B, Casa Cristo Colonial (more on that in the next post), a short walking distance from Old Havana on Saturday night, and devoted our Sunday to exploring the city.


I posted this photo on Instagram, mistaking this dude for Carlos Manuel de Céspedes aka the Abraham Lincoln of Cuba who with his grito de Yara (war cry from Yara) freed his slaves, called for the abolition of slavery, and called upon his fellow Cubans to rebel against Spanish rule. I was wrong, apparently this is Jose Martin. Oops. Anyway, good man.

May 28, 2014

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