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Havana, Cuba 3 /3 (Well, actually we are already in Cancun, Mexico but anyways.)
In this blog entry I was supposed to catch up with the present time and write about our stay in Havana, but as we didn't have much time to use Internet in Cuba, I am writing this from Cancun.
It's really hard to write anything about our time in Cuba - it was simply so amazing, we had so much fun and there is too many interesting things to mention in one blog post. To put it short, we got exactly what we wanted from our time in Cuba. We walked the streets of Havana (a lot!!!), got to know Cuban life, met local people, danced to salsa and reggaeton (or well, Michelle did), drank mojitos, smoked a cigar and got a fix of history and politics. Right now it feels that we got an overdose of Cuba in a positive way.
Our plan was to spend several days in Havana and then head to somewhere else in the country, but we simply got lured by the beauty of Havana and spent all of our days there. As some of you might know, the budget traveler's choice to stay in Cuba are the so-called casa particulares, private homes that have a license to host tourists. We too stayed in one of these during our trip, and as it was located a little bit out of the center of Havana, we got a nice insight to the life of ordinary Cubans. And that life was everywhere! There were always a lot of people on the streets, kids playing and older people talking, and also the private life of Cubans was very public, as the doors were always open and there was always music banging through the windows. This created a feeling of community that is nowhere to be found in the Western world, and also a feeling of security for us as travelers. Although we haven't being scared during our trip in Central America, Cuba was totally different in this sense as we could easily walk home even in the middle of the night feeling really safe.
Besides living in the middle of Cuban life, we tried to blend in with the locals by using the Cuban pesos as much as we could instead of the tourist currency. Although some people have said that this would not be easy and even illegal, we didn't find any problems with it. We went to the movies and ate at the local corner shop's where we could find a meal of rice-n-beans and meat for just 0,9 Euros. We had been warned that Cuba would be a really expensive place to stay, but by using moneda nacional, Cuba was actually one of the cheapest places we have stayed in although lodging was more expensive. We are not sure, but our ability to use the Cuban pesos so much could have been thanks to Michelle. As in many countries, Michelle's appearance looked perfectly Cuban and a lot of people thought she was a local. We used this benefit a lot, and it was often Michelle who ordered the food and paid for the movie tickets when using Cuban pesos. This also had downsides. A combination of a "Cuban" lady with a pale faced gringo can cause a lot of confusion... Like our casa owner so discreetly said, some people can regard Michelle as a jintera with her customer. Luckily the local kids didn't have these thoughts, and just thought that Jukka happens to be an albino.
I would have so much to say about Cuba but not enough time to do that, so I am starting to finish the story for now. But before that, a few words about the mentioned movie experience. It was the cheapest movie that we have ever seen! We only paid 2 Cuban pesos that equals to around 0,07 Euros! Like in many other sector's of Cuban life, the state subsidizes the movie tickets a lot and so many people can come to see them that it creates a huge line. We ended up spending 2 interesting hours waiting to get to the movie. It was much more fun than it sounds, as we met a nice Cuban couple on the line. Only the Cuban Spanish accent made our friendship a bit difficult... When we finally got to the biggest movie theatre we have ever seen (there must have been at least 1000 people watching the movie), we learned that whereas we see trailers and annoying ads before the movie in our capitalist movie theatres, the Cubans can enjoy an educative documentary about the life in Vietnam!
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