Day 3 -- Havana

We are staying at the best hotel in old Havana. It is a 5 star hotel. The room is big and nice and there is a coffee maker. No coffee-must purchase at the lobby. The breakfast buffet is immense. But it is difficult to find anything that is good. One would think that in this tropical place there would be an abundance of good fresh fruit. Not so. The hotel website says that wifi is available. Yes, but you have to buy a card ($4.50 per hour) and the connection is painfully slow and sometimes you can’t connect at all. That’s why we can’t post the blog from there. Cards are only for hotel guests, but yesterday a young man from the outside approached Bo and asked her if she could buy him a card. Why not. We took a tour of the city in a beautiful red 1951 Chevy convertible. Our driver, Ramon, took us to the other side of the Havana Bay via a tunnel. There, we stopped at a big statue of Christ with gorgeous views of the city, we also stopped at the Morro fort. At a military installation along the way we saw missiles and a soviet MIG. Then we drove back to our side of the bay and along Malecon to the famous Hotel Nacional where heads of state used to stay. Ramon took us through several interesting neighborhoods – Vedado, Cohi (??) where government people live in big villas, Miramar -- with big expensive houses and many big and small embassies. Havana is a beautiful city, and the number of spectacular buildings (most unfortunately in a state of complete or partial decay) is astonishing. If this city ever gets completely renovated, it will be a gem. We also stopped at Plaza de la Revolucion and took pictures of the famous mural of Che Guevara and the statue of Jose Marti; saw one of the biggest cemeteries in the world with over 2 million graves and drove through Bosque de Havana ( a little forest inside the city) with amazing walls of trees. After a 2-hour rest in the hotel to avoid the mid-day heat, we emerged again and walked O’Reilly street towards Plaza de Armas (Main Square). On the way, we stopped in a nice café for a sandwich and coffee. Then, we went to the City Museum housed in the former palace of the Spanish Governor. The palace is a beautiful colonial building, but the museum is very poor and doesn’t have much to show. In front of the palace is “Wooden Street”; this street was paved with wood because the governor didn’t like the noise the carriages made on cobblestones in front of his palace. The Havana symphony orchestra plays a concert in front of the palace every Friday at 4 pm so we saw that too. Then, we walked to the Templete, a small temple-like building where the city of Havana was founded in 1516, A black female guide gave us a great tour of this small building – with funny commentaries and stories. She said she wanted to practice her English to prepare for all the Americans that will soon be coming. Then we walked along the pretty Mercaderos Street to Plaza Vieja. On the way we stopped at the historical society to see an amazingly intricate and big model of Old Havana and in a beautifully renovated small colonial hotel Comte de Villanueva where we saw great photographs of a Cuban photographer Francis Reyes. In Plaza Vieja we were hoping to see a couple of exhibitions of the Havana Arts Biennale, but they were closing at 5 pm so we had beer instead. Then we walked and walked until we got to the hotel exhausted. After a short rest we asked the concierge for restaurant recommendations. He recommended a Russian restaurant Nazdorovye. It was excellent sitting on a balcony on the third floor with a great view of the sunset. We met a nice couple from Tasmania and compared our Cuban experiences.