Una Mezcla de Fotos

I cooked everyone dinner last week because once again, I am a helpful, amiable person. This time, my pseudo-humanitarian act was a payback for Brad, to whom I passed a note in class, furiously demanding him to give me a question to ask this guy we were interviewing. I could not understand his thick Cuban accent, and instead of breathing like a normal person, I became so frustrated with myself that I just made the problem worse. Anyway, it gave me an excuse to make a nice dinner, and now the six of us are making it a weekly rotation.

Complete with flowers and hors d’ouvres, cuban style:

For the first course, I assembled a ghetto cheese plate with the only 2 kinds to be found at the supermarket: cheddar and “queso.” (Ahhh yes, the cheeeese type of cheese). Stumbled across some saltines on the cookie isle, cha-ching. Of course, olives. And a loaf of bread from the Panadería – about a 40 minute round-trip walk down 70^th and sooo worth it.

I stole some pictures off of other people’s cameras. Here’s a mildly embarrassing display of Calambokidis and I being Cuban – rum and cigars, etc. Yeah well, maybe not Cuban, rather Americans in Cuba.

As a follow up to that: Waiting for the bus on my first day of school!!!

This was earlier in the semester, as seen in the pastey skin tones:

It really is beautiful here. The weather, obviously, and the natural landscape, but the overall aura of the city is unique. It’s extremely poor and decayed, but – in part due to the decay – so rich in culture. There are vibrant colors everywhere. I think for all the things Cubans don’t have access to, they make up for in color. All the houses are vivid blues and reds and greens – with equally bright shutters to match the orange flowers in the yard. But all the paint is peeling, which is just another constant reminder of their shortages. The average salary is less than $30 a month and the poverty is certainly visible, but the people here have so much pride for the revolution that they created for themselves.

Everyone is so happy to see that we’re trying to learn Spanish. All the taxi drivers light up when we start bombarding them with questions in our broken Spanish. Havana is all they know (most of them have never left the city limits), so they love telling us where to go and what to do. They correct our grammar and ask us how to say words in English.

Since internet is so expensive, we have to be really creative in our use of free time, which involves talking to a lot of locals. There are old men on street corners playing dominos, couples drinking coffee on their front porches, shirtless children playing impromptu sports games. It is a 1950’s time bubble like I had been told, but not only because of the old cars and limited resources. Life moves at a slower pace here. It’s a very in-the-moment culture, perhaps like the world was before the internet.

In the absence of technology, we’ve gotten really good at the creativity thing. Sometimes hazardously so.

Such as, airplane rides on the university quad. At the moment this picture was taken, I threw my lower back out and was crippled for a few days.

Bus stop yoga. (I swear it will catch on)

Learn how to eat rice without silverware: check. Who needs forks when you can tear off some of the cardboard box and elegantly scoop the rice into your mouth?

We went down to the Malecon (seawall) one night and hung out with a guy named Raul, whom 2 weeks later we found out is a celebrity. When we met, he informed us that he was famous, but we didn’t believe him. He and his friends took us to a discotec where the power went out, so we left and they showed us around downtown Havana. We then made our way back to the Malecon where I forced Raul to teach me how to salsa dance. He obliged, and his friend taught Shelby as the boys laughed at us. Two hours later, I was no better at salsa dancing and it was time to go home. Fast forward a few weeks, as we were browsing through the pictures from that night, Yadira, our maid, excitedly recognizes him and asks what we were doing hanging out with Raul. She informs us of his status and tells us to turn the TV on channel 15 at 9:00 that night. We do. A famous Cuban soap opera comes on. And there’s our friend. I have his number, so perhaps one day we’ll call him and go see what Cuban stardom is like.

Dillon and Raul:

Here's Dijon and I enjoying the Malecon during the day:

That’s the end of this hodgepodge of pictures and stories. So much more to write, not enough time. I can’t believe we’re in our sixth week already!