Author name: ozweaver

Yesterday (April 6), on the dock in Cayo Largo, these flags were flying from boats: New Zealand, Britain, France, Russia, Switzerland, Luxembourg (no kidding!), and the US. Those who had recently moved off the dock to anchor out flew flags from Norway and Sweden. It’s a veritable United Nations of sailors!

Since there aren’t two boats from any one country (except the Scandinavian countries) this feels like a true melting pot, and the eagerness we all feel to get to know each other gives this place a special friendliness. It’s just amazing. People have had boat issues, engine troubles, or even just a longing for cheese, and everyone wants to help. I can’t speak for the more pressing issues (though I know Bob has ferreted around in the workshop looking for items for others), but I’m happy to report that on Pandora we’ve been particularly helpful in assuaging the longing for cheese. We still have some cheddars from the US, good brie from France, and a wonderful Bella Vitano from Italy.

The head of this marina is named Pier, and he has worked here for over 30 years. He’s got lots of stories to tell, and I wonder if he fully knows what stories are told about him! After hearing recommendations to come here from anyone who has already visited, we then heard that “we must meet Pier.” He just returned from vacation yesterday morning, and made a bee-line to Pandora when he saw our big US ensign flying from the stern. He invited Bob to visit him in his office where he could show Bob the US flag he has displayed on his desk. He used to keep it hidden in his desk, but has recently taken to displaying it.

He also has a photo with Fidel taken decades ago. Pier certainly looks younger, but it’s hard to imagine Fidel getting any older than he is in this photo! Certainly there are no photographs showing a more current Fidel.

Late in the afternoon afternoon we met the Russians, six men who have chartered a catamaran for their yearly vacation together. Everyone brought out their flags for the photo op. It turns out there are rotary clubs in Russia, and Olag Karpeev (the captain on this charter) is president of the International Yachting Fellowship of Rotarians.

Tonight as I write this, they are having some adult beverages (Vodka perhaps) while listening to old American pop music. The BeeGees, I kid you not!

Oh! And I’ve found the perfect souvenir to bring home….a Cuban kitten! Man, the kittens here are adorable! There are a group of cats that hang out near the marina restaurant that remind me of the ¼ ocelot that a friend of mine used to have. Very sleek cats! I wonder if these are the same kind.

She likes Bob a lot.  Maybe she’ll follow us onboard before we leave…

And then there is this tiny new black kitten that would be just perfect for my daughter in law, though I’m certain that Rob thinks they already have too many cats. It’s all a pipe dream anyway, since there is no way I could get these kitties into the US. Too bad for me…

Yesterday we said goodbye to the two charming British men of a certain age, who are sailing an Island Packet 50’ out of Southampton. The owner, Jeremy, has been around the world in this boat, and often in the company of his childhood friend, Richard. Neither one of these men’s wives like to sail, so they often sail the long distances together. Jeremy’s wife may join him later in the spring along the ICW in the US, and perhaps I’ll meet her when they pass through Long Island Sound. Jeremy has invited Bob and me to visit them near Sissinghurst Castle, and when I mentioned I that I been there once with my good friend Lesley, Jeremy replied that I must have seen his large Georgian house ‘right next door.’ Wow…

Also the Swiss couple left yesterday afternoon. When they arrived we could not believe it was the couple who had been the first to look at old Pandora when we put her up for sale last spring. In the end they bought a different Saga, Discovery, owned by a friend of ours. We can’t wait to tell Carl that we saw his Discovery in Cuba. It’s amazing how small the world really is.

This week Lars, on Luna, also has two childhood friends visiting from Norway. We spent an evening together hearing about the two friends’ wives and children, as well as stories from the three men’s childhood together near Oslo. Even their parents are all still friends.

Yesterday evening we invited the young New Zealanders, Garth and Monique from Heatbeat, onboard for drinks. They got married just before leaving for their long voyage, three years ago. They arrived here yesterday afternoon, after a long non-stop sail from Honduras. Garth is 32, and Monique just turned 30 last month. They are the same ages our two sons, so how could I not feel maternal toward this adorable couple? Monique saw me knitting today and told me she has some crochet projects on Hearbeat, and some rope that she’d like to use to crochet containers to sit on their shelves for additional organization. Great idea!

Monique and Garth onboard Pandora last night.

There is a prodigious variety of sea life and island life here along with all the visiting foreign boats. Some of the little cayos nearby are inhabited by iguanos. I found this out quite by surprise when I looked up from gathering shells and found a herd of them in all sizes  coming toward me.  This was the big male.

There is live coral flourishing all the way to the beaches on these little islands. There are large and small conchs all over the beaches and shallow waters, and they are alive, along with the puffy red sea stars. You don’t find that in the Bahamas anymore.

Bob took this wonderful photo of a sea star, and I think I want to use it as one of my small format tapestries for the future.

Right in the marina, if you look into the water around the boats, or up where there bar is on shore, we can see giant tarpin with ramoras swimming nearby. Everywhere there are angel fish, sargeant majors, blue tangs and powder blue tangs, parrot fish. It’s very colorful. The water is so clean and clear. I wonder if all that will change, and how quickly, when American sailors start arriving by en masse in another few years.

The beautiful marina at Cayo Largo.  No wonder Pier is proud of his work.

And Pandora on the dock (she’s the one with the dark green hull) viewed from the bar.

Everyone has listened to me whine about not having talked to my kids in over a month now. Both the Brits and the Kiwis have offered for me to use their satellite phones to call the boys, as long as I can keep it to under 3 minutes! I’m certain I cannot do it. I can imagine myself saying “Hi, it’s Mom….start talking and just GO until you hear me hang up!”  I’m not sure I could be counted on to hang up in the allotted time.

So, although I am still very homesick, it’s incredibly interesting here in Cayo Largo. Bob wants Pier to come to the US this summer and give some talks to various sailing groups. I hope he can make it happen.  And Lars might come up our way….and the Brit, Jeremy…and who knows, maybe even Garth and Monique (the New Zealanders) will get blown off course from their intended voyage to Bermuda and on to Europe and find themselves up the Connecticut River.   Summer could be very interesting…

The last day of March was our last day at anchor in Cienfuegos. We took a road trip to Trinidad! After asking for a bus schedule from the marina office, we were told that there is a bus to Trinidad three times a day: 8.30 am, 1pm, and 3.30pm. We decided to make a day of it and went ashore early to catch that first bus of the day. Not only was the ticket office closed, but also there was no bus to Trinidad until 12.30pm. None of the times we’d been given matched what we found at the bus station. Hmmm…

But there are Cubans who hang out at the station and try to make connections for people needing to get places. Before we were even aware that we were being watched we were put in touch with a driver who had a Cuban family (mother, father, teenage boy and adolescent girl) who also wanted to go to Trinidad. So they crammed in the backseat while Bob and I sat up front with the driver, and we were off! It cost $15 CUCs for us, so it was only a bit more than the bus would have been at $12 CUCs.

It was a beautiful drive too. Still early enough in the morning for cool breezes and low light in the hills all around us. We drove past the Cuban Botanical Gardens, which we learned is quite an impressive collection of plants. I wish we had known about it sooner in order to plan a visit. The area between Cienfuegos and Trinidad has a lot of farming, impressive orchards of mango and bananas and sugar cane fields. Some of the sugarcane was being harvested, not an easy job, and many of the mango trees were laden with fruit. I had no idea how many mangoes can grow on one tree! No wonder there are so many mangoes in the markets.

The most dramatic view we had on the trip to Trinidad was the annual migration of land crabs. We came around a bend to the sight of thousands of red-clawed, blue-bellied creatures completely blocking the road….all moving the same direction—inland from the coast. They were on their way back to their shelters and tunnels after spawning in the sea. I think the journey is several miles. We were behind a bus that was leaving a terrible swath of crushed crabs behind it, and our driver was quite adept at not hitting any crabs. The crabs knew they were in trouble and were all ready for a fight—pincers high in the air, snapping menacingly. They seemed to have no idea that it was not going to be a fair fight against buses and cars. I also have to tell you that the smell of crushed crab is terrible.

This is taken from internet since we did not get a photo of our own.

We’ve since learned that the crabs will scale anything that gets in their way on their journey to the ocean. They can scale houses and cars that happen to be in their path. Bob wanted to stop for a photograph, and the thought of the crabs climbing over our car, or worse, climbing over Bob himself, was beyond unnerving to me. We didn’t do it.

Coming into Trinidad made me forget all about the crabs. It was stunning! Trinidad was founded in 1514, and had a big celebration for their quincentennial in 2014. The city is a Unesco site with good reason. Against the harsh sun the soft pastels of the buildings is quite calming. It was a hot day, but there were plenty of shady spots to retreat and the pretty colors of the buildings were a relief to the eyes. We had started our tour with coffee in a small, sequestered part of the Plaza Mayor. We sat under a large canopy of vines that had interesting fruit hanging from them. I had a bit of a conversation with our waitress and learned that the name of this plant and its fruit is maracuya. It is edible as well as being medicinal. It made a wonderful bower to hide from the mid-morning hot sun.

Then we took a little tour of the central part of this city. And here I found much more evidence of textile handwork. There were lots of female street vendors selling crocheted tops and shawls and table linens done in what I am beginning to recognize as a traditional Cuban style of floral embroidery mixed with pulled thread embroidery.   Handwork was everywhere, including in the local Museo del Arte. I was quite determined to buy a tablecloth and settled on one at the museum. The women who work in that part of the museum were very proud of these tablecloths and we all enjoyed taking them down from the walls to admire the work close up as I tried to settle on which one I would buy.

Here is one street of vendors selling handmade textiles.

A feast of wonderful choices!

(I will admit here that I’m going to give this table cloth to my new daughter in law….I’m certain that she will not see this. She and my son now have our large dining room table and buffet that had been Bob’s grandmother’s from the turn of the 20^th century, but I still have all the linen damask cloths that came with that table. It’s time help them start a new collection of heirloom linens, before they get the original ones at some future point.)

Is this possibly Miss Trinidad posing at the entrance to the Museo de Arte?

We visited the Museo de Aquitectura where the entrance fee is $1 CUC per person, but if you take photographs there is an additional $5 CUC charge. It was an interesting museum, but we did not choose to pay for photography. There was a room of detailed displays on how the heavy mahogany doors were made and how they were hinged. The best part of the museum for me was the inner courtyard, lined in shady plants along the perimeter and in the center filled with about three dozen large urns planted in rose bushes. What a heavenly scene to find such a large collection of roses in bloom! Around the roses were some smaller pots of portulaca and vinca, and I learned that the Cubans call these plants something entirely different, although a rose is still a rosa.

Another inner courtyard in one of the historic buildings.  We had just returned from visiting the rooftop.

Roof top views of Trinidad.

Birds in cages are everywhere.  The cages hang on the outside of private apartments and in the public squares.

School children on a field trip in the Plaza Mayor.

We had lunch in the prettiest spot in all of Trinidad! Who cares about the food in a spot like this?—yet I have to say it one of our best lunches too—shrimp and lobster chunks over pasta, with gazpacho to start, and a mojito and sparkling water. We shared the pasta dish and had more than enough. I hated to leave. All the tables were set with At the table next to us we met a woman traveling alone from Malaysia who was celebrating her 40^th birthday. We all agreed that we had found the prettiest restaurant in all of Trinidad.

We sat on the balcony at the table on the left.  The Malaysian tourist is already sitting at the center table in the photo.

Local color.

In the late afternoon we headed to the bus station hoping to find another shared taxi. It took a bit of doing, but eventually we found a taxi driver who would take us back for $20 CUC, and no sharing. As we passed the area where the crabs had been there was nothing left but the ones who didn’t make it across the road.

Farewell, Cienfuegos, in the early morning light.

The next morning, April 1^st, we left Cienfuegos to sail into the small archipelago of cayos called Cayos de Dios. It promised to be a good day for sailing with reasonably strong wind on the beam. Getting out of Cienfuegos harbor was quite rough for me, and then the sailing was also a bit ‘sporty,’ as Bob would say. So I ended up getting horribly sea sick, worse than I’ve been in decades. The day was not improved when we settled at Cayo Sal, although it was a better choice (read calmer) of anchorage than others along that route. At the end of the day, the wind was mild, from the east, but there was a wrap-around swell coming around the little cay that put all the boats rocking side to side. I was miserable! After a very tiresome night of rolling side to side, the next morning Bob tried putting a bridle on our anchor line and turning the boat sideways to the wind so that we’d be facing into the swell of waves. It was much better, but I never did fully recover.

Sunday (yesterday) we left Cayo Sal to head for Cayo Largo in the larger Archipelago de los Cannarreos. It was a mild sailing day, but I still could not shake my seasickness! I’ve always heard that everyone gets over their sickness after three days at sea, so I was rather disappointed not to shake it off. In the afternoon we chose to come all the way into the marina at Cayo Largo, and I immediately felt better. So, while I didn’t fit the old saying about three days at sea curing my seasickness, I did find another old saying to be quite true: “Nothing cures seasickness like sitting under an apple tree!” No apple trees here, but palm trees make a suitable substitute!

At this moment we are in the lap of luxury. This is a clean and up to date little marina, with lots of tourist amenities on shore. There was some kind of festival last night that I missed because I was just too tired to participate. There are bone-fishing boats here as well as dive and snorkel boats for hire. There are lots of bright white beaches to explore by dinghy. I think we will spend most of the week here. We are plugged in to electricity so we have our air conditioner running for the first time. It was quite wonderful last night, cool and dry, but this morning our electricity keeps shutting off now that more boats have arrived on this dock. I guess the electricity here is not meant for a full house of visitors.

One of the marina employees told us that the white sand here never gets hot, no matter how strong the sun is. We plan to check that out today.

 

It’s the penultimate day of March, and April is on my mind. I am homesick and a bit under the weather, and I can’t think of anything better than being in Connecticut right now! I’m sure the buds on the daffodils are swelling, along with the buds on the many tulip poplars in the area.

I came down with a cold a few days after our return from Havana. It’s pretty rare for cruisers to get sick, and when we do it’s almost always from having contact with people ashore. I have no idea why cruisers don’t often get sick.

We’ve spent several days walking all over Cienfuegos. One day we walked 8 miles, and two other days we walked between 6 and 7 miles—in terrible heat. So for the past two days I have just stayed onboard working on projects and trying to stay cool. There has been a flotilla of little jellyfish in the harbor, so no swimming. A cold shower in the late afternoon has been quite refreshing. Sometimes we run our Honda generator at night in order to run the air conditioning!  Luckily the people on the boats nearby us have all been taking shore trips and are not onboard listening to the Honda run.

On Sunday afternoon Bob noticed one of the Windjammer schooners from Maine enter the harbor. It’s the Harvey Gamage. They are here looking into ideas for educational programs. Meanwhile, Bob is thinking of ideas to get them to visit Essex.Bob has been onboard a couple of times, and both of us were invited for lunch yesterday. What a galley. That big cast iron stove takes over an hour to preheat. That would be lovely on a chilly morning in Maine, but baking is no fun in the current Cuban heat wave.

The communal dining table where we ate lunch.  That’s a big chest freezer at the bottom of the photo.  We contributed a bottle of coke, a bag of ice and a package of chocolate chip cookies to the lunch.  Not very exciting, but the crew have been missing ice (couldn’t they make a ton of it in that huge freezer?) and American Coke and Keebler cookies.

During our last sail from one of the cays to Cienfuegos I dug out some yarn I’d brought to make a sweater. Before I left home I bought some yarn from the Canadian mail order company Elann.com. They were having an Amazon special on full bags of an Australian merino DK weight yarn that they call Embrace DK. It is processed (superwashed) and spun in China, and it will be a while before I know what I think of that!

Last year I knitted the sweater called “Baby Cables and Big Ones Too,” by a Finnish designer Suvi Simola.

I wanted to wear the sweater against my skin so I last year I bought some Cascade pima cotton yarn that gave the right gauge for this sweater. The sweater is knit from the top down, which means you can try it on as you knit. I did try it on along the way, and I was happy with what I was getting, until I got almost all the way down to the hem. By that point the cotton yarn could not support the weight of itself, and the thing hung on me like a rag. The neck, which is a very pretty raglan rectangle, was distorted by the weight of all that cotton. It was NOT pretty.

So, last fall as I packed up things to put onboard, I ripped the needles out of that sweater and grabbed the bag of Elann Embrace DK. They got stuffed in the back of one of the cabinets on Pandora, and I promptly forgot all about it…until last week.

As we sailed to Cienfuegos I began the sweater. The yarn is soft and the label says it will not pill. The color I chose is Wedgewood blue.   I have now finished the body and have tried it on a couple of times in order to redesign the hem. I like it! I have opted not to make the shaped waistline, but began some increases at the side ‘seams’ (there are no seams since this is knit in the round) to make my version into an A-line shape with little tab openings in garter stitch before doing the garter stitch ‘hem’ at the bottom. I am happy with this look.

Now I am also redesigning the sleeves. The sleeves on the original look long on some of the models, and too-long sleeves are one of my biggest pet peeves. You can’t do anything in a garment with sleeves that are too long. They just get in the way all day long, and get downright disgusting if you try to eat anything…and cooking is impossible. Yes, they always look so feminine on the models wearing these garments, but no one can actually live in clothing with sleeves that droop down your hands.

So I’ll just have to see how the sleeves work out. I’m not planning to do the big long cable on one sleeve. I think I will do a one of the delicate little cables (Cable B, in fact) on both sleeves that should not go much beyond the garter cuff. Since the sleeve is knit in the round from the shoulder down I won’t be dealing with placing the cables until I near the end. The cables on the body are asymmetrical, so I’ve decided to make the sleeves match each other.

Starting the first sleeve:

I haven’t done much else. It’s been too hot to for dragging out my big tapestry loom, but I certainly miss it. My hands are too hot for the tiny manipulations required for tatting. And it’s actually been too hot for the wool yarn I’m using in the sweater, but I have to do something!  Not counting the matching sweaters I made for my sons when they were young, this is the first time I’ve knitted a sweater pattern more than once.

Bob and I are now watching for a weather window to head further west. It looks like Friday and Saturday may be good days for heading out. We will stop in a couple of Cayos on our way to Havana.   Our visas run out during the first week of April and I hope we can get them renewed easily in Cayo Largo.

In case you’re wondering about the private tour bus even more than the Stones (doubtful, I know), I’ll start with a tale from the latter part of our trip to Havana yesterday. We were standing on a triangle in the middle of a busy intersection in Havana, near midnight, when police sirens heralded a motorcade of SUVs coming through. One of these busy streets had been taken over the by the million spectators who’d been at the concert, so it was very difficult for any vehicles to get through on this street….but a police escort did the trick! We are certain it was the Stones—so no tour bus for them.

The private tour bus in the title actually refers to the bus Bob and I took into Havana for this historic event. If you’re like me you are imagining the standard bus you’d take from anywhere in the US—a huge coach with cushy seating, A/C and tv screens for entertainment to pass the time. Not so in Cuba! (Although, in all fairness, they do have those kinds of buses here for foreign tour companies) Our lovely vehicle was a 1952 Ford armored truck, and there wasn’t much in the ‘cushy’ department. Who knows what engine it now had inside, and how long ago the suspension was replaced. The roads in Cuba are in pretty bad shape so whatever suspension we had in that truck was not up to the task!

The trip into Havana was a 5-hour affair and the trip home was about 4. That’s 9 hours of hard bouncing, and I am feeling every bit my age this morning as I begin the recovery from that experience! This tour bus had been equipped with relatively new homemade windows (just a reminder that armored have no windows, in case you hadn’t thought about that type of vehicle from a passenger’s point of view), where the reinforced metal sides of the truck had been cut out and some rustic ‘windows’ had been bolted into the holes. Lovely… and there was even air conditioning, although it was quite humid air and not very cool. There was even a tv screen up at the front of the truck, from which the driver entertained us with hours of Cuban music videos. In a country where the Guarda Frontera searches each arriving boat for pornography, I was a bit shocked by what they deem acceptable. But of course, being an American of Protestant background, I have been a bit sheltered in that area. Nine hours of that was more than enough for the foreseeable future.

We were able to sign on to this bus trip through some people in the marina. There is quite a Norwegian contingent here, and through them we learned of a Norwegian expat who has been living in Cuba for a dozen years (he is not a sailor, and lives in an actual house in Cienfuegos).   He was looking for passengers to fill his bus (only about 6 – 8 people) and we were the only non-Norwegians onboard. Oh yeah, I forgot about the two Cuban girlfriends….they aren’t Norwegian either! But since their trip was underwritten by their Norwegian escorts I still think of it as a Norwegian endeavor. The cost per person for this excursion—round trip—was 20 Cucs. That’s somewhere in the neighborhood of $23 –Not bad, although the accommodation was about what you’d expect for that price. It was a rare experience that quite made up for the roughness!

We left at 9 am, and arrived in Havana about 2pm. I thought we’d be going straight to the stadium, but our Norwegian host did not think that was necessary. He wanted to have a good lunch and a little rest before joining the crowds. He dimissed the two bus drivers and told them to come back the Hotel Comoradora about 6pm. I thought that would be WAY too late for getting anywhere within sight of the stage. But Pier knows a thing or two after living here so long.

The trip to Havana started with breakfast on the bus, supplied by Piers and Alex. Beers all around at 9am. Breakfast of champions— at least for these adventurous Norwegian and Cuban champions! Bob and I abstained although we suffered some teasing for this. By 11am we were making our 2^nd rest stop of the trip…this one at a real snack bar/gas station along the road, as opposed to some of the others stops which involved nothing more than pulling over to a wilderness of cactus and other fauna…the two Cuban women, skipping off lightly into the cactus, in high heels, with their toilet paper in hand. I have mentioned, haven’t I, that it is de riguer to carry toilet paper on your person at all times in Cuba. You certainly won’t find it in many public bathrooms. So the women were already prepared for al fresco rest stops.

Anyway, at our 11 am stop, everyone serendipitously bought big tubes of Pringles in every flavor in stock at the snack shop! It is odd enough that we all chose Pringles since there aren’t many US items in Cuba—but even odder is that there is always a full choice of rum at rest stops and gas stations in Cuba. So, back on the bus/armored truck where Alex jokingly offered a brunch of Pringles with drinks of vodka and some kind of orange soda. I am happy to say I passed on the vodka concoction, but gave in to sharing a tube of Pringles with Bob. He washed it down with a beer. Well, it had to be noon somewhere….

So, I didn’t get a photo of Bob’s brunch, but he did take one of me. Just to be clear, I am holding Bob’s beer so he can take the photo—though I fully admit to taking a couple of sips to wash down those salty chips. (More than a bit embarrassed to share this.)

We had 5 rest stops in all on the trip into Havana, and I think that is the main reason it took 5 hours to get there. Driving through Havana was quite an experience–a fast tour of what we’ll see when we come back the by boat in mid-April. We saw everything from Soviet cement apartment buildings that looked like we’d been dropped into Beirut, to 1960s ‘modern’ architecture that never did much for me, and always reminds of the “Jetsons” cartoon. Some of this architecture has remained in remarkably good shape. I wouldn’t know how unusual this might be since most of it in my part of the US is gone—long gone.

Coming into town we went through a circular intersection where two large buildings dominated the view. One of them had a large depiction of Che Guevara on one windowless side, while other featured the same style depiction of Ayatolla Khomeini. We passed this intersection on our return, and they are even more striking at night, being backlit with blue lights.

The highlight of our quick tour of Havana was Embassy Row. It was the most well kept part of the city that we saw, and the embassies themselves were a treasure trove of Spanish architectural styles, except (no surprise) the Russian Embassy which is the largest embassy here and done in that iconic Soviet 1960s style. The US embassy is not on Embassy Row, and Pier pointed out how to get there when we return. I’m sure we’ll have to start from scratch though as neither of us is good at remembering details on a day full of so many!

We arrived at the Hotel Comodoro, which caters to a Scandinavian clientele, a mix of 1960s modern block hotel and newer Spanish influenced villa type buildings surrounding a pool and various courtyard gardens. The newer section of the hotel was quite pretty. We had lunch under a covered terrace near the pool. Then Pier recommended we all rest for a bit before we went to the stadium. In fact, Pier and his compatriots needed a bit of time to manage their hangovers. They were all quite under the weather. One of the young Cuban girls was really quite ill. None of them were looking quite as put together as they had at 9am.

We spent this rest time trying to skype our children…no luck there…and then checking email. We were trying to find the part of the hotel lobby with the best internet speed. We settled on a long side hallway that we had hoped to avoid because it smelled of decades of cigarette smoke and something else a bit old—a vague mustiness which felt like leftover tropical air from the days before air conditioning. It wasn’t until later, when Bob took a walk outside that he found a completely ruined part of the hotel that was just at the end of the lobby hallway where we’d been sitting. On the other side of that hallway was a completely destroyed part of the hotel that must have been ruined in some kind of storm. It had been some kind of ballroom, but now all the windows were gone and the remains of what was inside had been soaked by high tides ever since. With all the upgrades to this hotel it was quite shocking to stumble on this wreckage. It didn’t happen recently.

Do you, like me, have a mental image of how people dress to go to an outdoor concert? I think my conception of these events stems back to Woodstock and all that has happened since, and must match most people’s who live anywhere in the US or northern Europe. Since you are going to be outside for longer than you can imagine, without much in the way of creature comforts, most of us think it’s best to be as comfortable as possible. However, I have noticed during our years in the Bahamas and now in Cuba, that some women see this as an opportunity to put forth their best ‘Beyonce’ effort. Our two young Cuban companions were dressed to kill, with high heels to boot, and make up that made them both look absolutely flawless. I think they were both younger than my two sons, which meant that I although I could have been their mother, I would have been a bit out of my prime at the time of their births! Their two Norwegian escorts must have been my age or older. No comment there.

Here is our little entourage waiting on for the concert to start. From left to right: Pier, Dione (accent on that final ‘e’), me, Anna, Alex. Lars had left at this point to join some friends for the weekend.

We have had no access to any actual news since leaving the Bahamas, which has been weeks now, so what we have heard about the Stones’ concert is hearsay. We heard that 500,000 people were estimated to come. I figured if you even wanted to see the stage you probably had to arrive at least 24 hours ahead of time. Pier thought arriving about 1 – 1 ½ hours early would be plenty. And he was right. What a shock! There wasn’t any bad traffic when we arrived in Havana, and there still wasn’t at 6.30, when our bus driver delivered us to the stadium. The roads around the stadium were closed to vehicles, but there just weren’t that many vehicles. It was a sea of pedestrians. Now people were saying there were a million people on hand. I wonder when we’ll ever find out what the numbers were.

Our bus let us off right where the roads were closed, so we didn’t even have a long walk to get into the stadium grounds. The stage set up and lights were amazing to me, who hasn’t been to a rock concert in more decades than I’ll admit to here. And back in that distant era they were held indoors and had a finite number of seats available.

We were so much closer to the stage than I would ever have dreamed, so it was quite exciting for me….not that we were close enough to see Mick Jagger’s facial features. But he was about ½” tall, as were the others, and I could clearly tell them apart and watch them move about the stage. I never expected that, given that we didn’t arrive until almost 7pm for an 8pm concert! The video screens were impressive too, and it was great to watch the real performers while also seeing the details on the big screens.

Many people were organizing themselves by nationality by putting up flags. I saw a large American flag at one point, moving through the crowd at stage center, but it then disappeared somewhere else. We were not planning on leaving our bus group since we didn’t want to miss our ride home, so I don’t know how big that group was. I’m sure someone made an attempt to estimate the number of US attendees. Near us was a big Norwegian contingent, and right at the stage was what might have been the biggest foreign group from –the UK, flying a giant Union Jack.

People were climbing poles to get a better view of the stage, and this young man was particularly fun to watch.

And finally there was the concert itself! I loved it…. They opened with “Jumping Jack Flash”—Mick Jagger still skips all over the stage and still appears to have the energy that he had when he was 20-something. Keith Richards can still squat all the way done on his elderly knees, and actually did it several times in a row (to outrageous cheers) just to show that he could. Surely he had cortisone injections recently and then took a little something to numb the pain before the concert. Whatever…it was still amazing! I wonder if they feel as worn out this morning as I do?

I’m sure there are videos all over the internet as I write this, and they’ll do more than any words I can write. It was great to be there, and I can’t wait to see footage of the concert too–although I might not get to do that until I return to the US. I’m so glad we went, even in spite of the challenge of finding our armored truck afterward, which took 2 hours. We got back to Cienfuegos around 3.30, and back onboard at 4am. Neptune smiled down on me by returning me to a calm harbor for that early morning dinghy ride back to Pandora.

Boy, my dogs are barking!  There is a lot of walking to do in this town.  Luckily the harbor where Pandora is anchored, called Punta Gorda, is a ‘short’ walk into Cienfuegos—only about 20 minutes.  However, day after day, that really adds up!  A couple of days we walked between 4 and 5 miles, and one day we walked over 8 miles.  And it’s hot!  Have I mentioned it’s hot??  Bob keeps asking me if I want a sweater. The answer is still YES!  And I want the weather to go with it!

On the first day we found a small shop along the main street in Cienfuegos, where a woman (younger than I am) sells various items of handwork that include crochet and embroidery.  There were embroidered table linens and lots of crocheted sweaters and shawls.  There was a rack of sewn clothing, traditional Cuban guayaberra type shirts for men and some lovely women’s tops embellished with machine sewn tucks and hand embroidery.  It was a small shop, decorated like a living room in a house.  After talking with the owner for a bit we learned it is her house and the shop was most likely her living room.  At one point her elementary school aged son came out from an interior door, wearing a school uniform.  It was late afternoon, she kissed him goodbye, and he was off to some after school activity.  Bob happened to see through the door that there was a bed in that room.

The owner spoke English quite well and we were able to talk about a number of things.  She made some of the crocheted items herself, but many were done by other family members.  They were all lightweight pieces made with fine threads for wearing in the hot climate of Cuba.  The sweaters were all open work that would be worn over a tank top or camisole.  They were really lovely.  The owner—silly me!  I did not get her name—prefers knitting herself, and that launched us on a great conversation because we’ve both been knitting since we were very young.  She can knit carrying the yarn in either hand, as can I, and she can knit in either direction like I can.  I think I’d enjoy knowing her.

 

We stopped again the next day, when Bob wasn’t so hot, so he could try on some of the guayaberras.  We chose one, and I bought a small table square that had pulled thread embroidery in the center and a nice hemstitched edging.  I would love to have bought more, but there was no more to buy.  I was also hoping to find other handwork shops, but no luck on that!  We passed a window (open shutters, no glazing) where a woman was sitting at a sewing machine, sewing a garment out of white fabric.  Behind her on the back wall of this tiny room there were some traditional Cuban clothing for men and babies hanging on a rack.  She motioned for us to come in, but it felt so cramped in the tiny room that we passed on that.

One day we had lunch in the Palacio de Jagua that is now a government owned restaurant and tourist spot.  Each day I think bus-loads of tourists are brought here for lunch.  We managed to find a table for lunch in between two bus tours.  A palacio is a large, ornate structure where government offices are on the lower floors and a residence for the higher-ranking government official is on the upper floors.  In this palacio the lifestyle was very ornate, Moorish Victorian.  It felt very strange to eat a meal in such a luscious Moorish setting. It felt like eating in a mosque, and that felt rather sacrilegious—even though this building had never beena mosque.  All the lacy cutwork on the walls was plaster.  It is a beautiful space.  The building is about 3 stories tall and there is a terrazzo bar on the roof.  We plan to visit there this evening.

The Palacio de Jagua

 

This is the entrance to the Palacio

 

The dining room:

 

We have tackled buying some food items in the local shops.  We’ve now bought several kinds of bread from a panaderia, and from street vendors on bikes with large boxes of pastries strapped on the back with bungy cords.  Yesterday we had an interesting experience trying to buy cheese and butter.  People kept getting in front of us on the cheese/butter line—at a counter in the back of the shop where cheese and butter are stored.  Finally when there was no one left to get in front of us I asked for ‘queso y mantequilla.’  The man motioned and said in ‘Spanglish’ that we had to pay for cheese and butter in the checkout line before we could get it from him.  Okay….we had waited a long time to get this info, and off we went to wait in the checkout line, where all those people who’d gotten in front of us were now waiting to pay for their cheeses that supposedly they had already paid for.  That did not make sense to me, but when I finally got to the cashier I told her that we wanted a kilo of cheese and a ‘brick’ of butter.  She looked at the empty counter –where are the goods?  I explained that the cheese counter man had told me to pay first.  This started a barrage of angry sounding Spanish between the two—the woman in the front of the store and the cheese man at the back of the store speaking very loudly and forcefully to each other across the space.    Anyway, it turns out that we had to pay for butter before getting it.  Who knows why?  We think maybe it is rationed from the lines we saw in Santiago of people waiting to get butter.  So we payed for the butter, went back to the cheese counter and got the butter and cheese and then went back to the cashier line to pay for the cheese.  Crazy!

We also saw a huge line of Cuban women waiting in front of a women’s clothing shop.  The glass door had a sign that said it was open (apierto), but the line was forming outside and no one was going in.  I think something of great value may have arrived in that shop and they were monitoring how many could enter at one time.  If I could communicate better I would have asked about this.

There is a center park surrounded by a parliament building, a beautiful theater, and church, all dating back to the Victorian era and therefore quite ornate.  It’s been a wonderful few days here, even though my feet are tired.

Here is Bob holding his Essex Yacht Club burgee in the park.

 

Although this photo is really all about the well preserved Buick (??), the theater is in the background.  We may try to catch a performance here on Easter Sunday of something we simply cannot fathom from the advertisements at the ticket office.

 

For us, it will be more about being in the space than seeing the performance!

 

Before walking back to the marina we stopped for a cold drink and listened to local musicians.  The bongo/cow bell player, the mariachi player and the flutist were the singers and they were terrific!  They did a rendition of “Volare” that was fabulous! You can just barely see the string base player behind the bongo player.

 

We have begun making plans for how to get to Havana by bus or taxi for the Rolling Stones concert.  Hopefully it will all work out and both of us will be writing about that early next week.  We will certainly be among the oldest people there.  If the audience is expected to be around 500,000, I wonder if we will even see the stage.  Wish us luck!