Day 3 The Beach

Day 3 The Beach
(Raul where are you ?)

Woke up in time for 8 am Mass….the nuns (mostly from the Philippines) voices were like angels…since I was the only stranger present the priest stared at me during his sermon….of course it was all in Spanish…he did refer to the Saint Carmen whose feast day it was and the nuns laughed when the priest made a reference to the Nuns of Carmen….later this priest was at breakfast and we exchanged some stories…

Breakfast at the convent was again delicious….Austin slept through his breakfast…

At 10 am the driver that I had gotten through Manuel was waiting in the lobby…his name Raul…he was ex-military and very stern…first driver that did not laugh at my jokes…dam shame

We had hired him for $100 to take us 2 hrs to the beach and stay there for a couple of hours and then drive back…right off the bat, when we got on the highway, La Policia stopped us at one of those check points….they claimed something was wrong with his lights…but after showing several papers and turning on the lights for the lady, she let us go (you know they do the same thing in American…usually to minority groups)

We had a nice drive along the northern coast of Cuba….and got to see some sugar cane fields and some mountains….also a lot of oil wells (on our last trip our driver said that there was NO oil in them wells, it was just for the tourist buses that go back and forth to Havana)

Austin asked if Raul our driver had some more modern music to play and he put in a Rapper video…the kids were all laughing….we were back in the USA…but after a few songs, Craig and I decided to go back to softer music.

We drove through a couple of towns, one called Mantazas, and the Americans got a little flavor of another town besides Havana.

When we got to Varadero Beach (you can google earth it on your computer…2 hrs east of Havana) everyone got excited….our first stop was a bank, but they were closed for lunch…we looked for a place to have lunch, but we decided to eat at the public beach pavilion that had pizza place, sandwich place and several other options…and bathrooms….the kids were not too excited to have to pay a bathroom attendant 25 cents to pee in a nasty toilet….(and Austin will tell you they have no seats !!....i said who would want to sit there anyways)

We also went souvenir shopping….since they were so many places to check out along the beach road…

We were going to go back to the bank at 1 pm, but we could not find our driver….where is Raul ?

Craig decided to take a horse drawn taxi to the bank while I watched the boys in the ocean.

This public beach was a little different than our last visit. There were probably about 3,000 regular Cubans swimming….mostly African-Cubans…I sat in the shade and talked to some old ladies, while the boys played ball in the water with some Chickas…

One old lady was 75 yrs old and claimed to be from Santa Clara….they had ridden 3 hrs on a bus to get to the Beach….she claims to have remember El Dolores Sugar Mill….our course she said things are bad and no one has work…

We finally found Raul…and told him we were exhausted from shopping and the beach and the sun and ready to go back to Havana….we found a nice corner house with 2 old people who let us change into our dry close before getting in the van….they were 80 and 84 years old…I left them $5 dollars.

We stopped at a Pina Colado hut half way back to Havana….you pay $2 for the drink and they leave a bottle of rum on the counter and you can put as much run into the glass that you want….dam shame

I had a few….Austin drank up half his glass and then filled the rest with rum…double dam shame. It was a fun stop !!

When we arrived in Havana we took a little tour of the Malecon (highway in Havana along the water) and some of the big hotels and a quick visit to Celicia….we also saw the US interest building…and the house of the Gaston Tias which is now a school.