Lines
06 June 2016 | Santiago de Cuba
Mark
Our first stop this morning was the internet place. There was quite a line waiting to buy internet cards for $2.00cuc and the store wasn't even open yet. There was a guy, however, selling the same cards for $3.00cuc if you didn't want to wait. Will & Sandy decided to wait and try later. I still had time on the previous card, so just did a quick download/upload. Next was the airline office to buy tickets to Havana. There was a longer line there, but at least it was open. A nice woman explained to us that we needed to remember the person in front of us in line as we would go to the ticket counter right after her. This became more obvious when we finally got inside and found 30 chairs of people waiting ahead of us. You just sat anywhere and went up when it was your turn. Kind of strange, but it worked. There were spaces for 6 ticket agents, but only 3 were working and a couple of them seemed to take breaks often. When we finally got our turn, there were no flights to Havana Wed or Thur, but there were spaces on Friday. We took that. It will shorten our time in Havana, but we get another day in Santiago instead of a very long day (12-15 hrs) on a bus. By the time we finished, it had taken 2 hours of waiting in line. I did find out one reason for the slowness - the reservation system appeared to be DOS based. Everything was pure ASCII and errors were just rejected as "Invalid input" with no explanation. It took our agent 5 tries to get all four names, passport numbers, etc. in correctly. Since the airline tickets had nearly used up our CUCs, we then went to the bank. Only a short line there, but when we got to the door, we were informed the bank was closed. Only open 8:30-11:00. None in the PM. A helpful man showed us where a money chager was located. The exchange rate was not quite as good, but there was no line and we got our CUCs. By then we were hot and tired so we stopped in a park for a beer. A guy came up selling something in tiny paper cones. It turned out to be peanuts, good with the beer! Finding a place for lunch was a challenge as we wanted sandwiches instead of a full meal. We ended up in a little cafe near our casa. Fortunately, we decided to share two sandwiches between the 4 of us as they were huge. Will & Sandy went to take a nap (which perhaps we should have done) but Deb & I walked back to the internet place, strolled down a side street with vendors - mostly tooled leather - and finally found our way to the Bacardi museum. It was a strange museum. The second floor (where you went first) was a collection of mostly European art from the Bacardi collection. Nothing real great and very little order, but it was air conditioned! The first floor was dioramas and artifacts from the Spanish revolution. We also went to the Carnival museum which was tiny, but more fun with lots of carnival costumes and posters. By then we were hot and VERY tired, so we returned to our room for a rest. Both Deb & Sandy were feeling a bit under the weather and did not want to go out again or have dinner. Will wasn't interested in the music, especially not the 10:00 start time for the Casa de la Trova, so I went out alone. More about that in another post.