La Habana

So now I’m on to my next adventure: Havana for three months. I have been here close to two weeks and so far and I’m loving it! The city is so big – so much different from Halifax and Campeche. We spent our first 5 days here in a hotel until we picked which ‘casa particulares’ we wanted to stay in. Casa particulares are houses owned by families who have extra rooms and want to rent them out to tourists. Dalhousie has used the same houses for years so it was just a matter of going to see our choices and choosing which house/family/roommate we want to live with. Ana Maria, Ben and I chose to live with an amazing family who have an incredible house just two minutes away from the University of Havana. Marcia lives with her son Frank, and his wife Anabel who have a one year old daughter named Ana Paula. Included in our rent we get breakfast and dinner each day. So far the food has been amazing!

Last week and this week we have been in intensive Spanish classes before we start our development courses next week. We’re all in different levels determined by a test we took the first day. Classes are from 9am-12:30pm Monday to Friday, which gives us the rest of the day to explore the city (and siesta, of course!). We live in a great part of the city; there’s a park, movie theatre, supermarket, many restaurants and little shops all within walking distance – not to mention our university is a stone’s throw away. Also about a 10 minute walk away is the Malecon. So far we’ve spent an afternoon there reading and a night there socializing with other Cubans and foreigners our age. It’s a really great hang out spot!

They absolutely love pizza here. A lot of people have turned their homes into fast food restaurants; the majority only having pizza and spaghetti on their menus. The first week we were here we were having a pizza a day because we couldn’t find any other options! There’s actually a pretty good pizza place literally attached to the house we live in – so I’m trying to use all the will power I can to not go there a lot – it’s SO greasy! One time went to this crazy place called Sky Pizza. Most restaurants here are run out of people’s homes, but this family didn’t have a ground floor apartment. Their solution was to put stoves on the top of their roof and sell pizza from the roof while lowering a basket up and down with the pizza and money. It was such a funny experience – a bunch of people would stand on the road a yell their order up, then when it was ready he would lower the basket down and you took your pizza and put the money in the basket which he would then bring back up. The pizza wasn’t amazing, but for less than $.50 and having it come from the sky we will probably become regulars.

The program hires a student who has done this program in the past to spend the first two weeks with us; showing us around the city and the university. For the past three years it’s been Dustin. Dustin has shown us all the good places to eat and meet other students as well as taken care of a lot of the logistical things. It’s been great to have someone around who can show us all those things because it’s such a big city!

We have had the chance to go into Habana Vieja (Old Havana) a couple of times which has been so cool to see. The ‘White House’ called El Capitolio is just at the entrance of this old part of the city – which is a neighbourhood of incredibly old buildings and great little restaurants. Other than that we’ve walked around our part of the city a lot trying to get to know our way around. It’s been really wonderful so far – and we know it will just keep getting better!