Day One - The Invasion

Day One. The Invasion.

(Aside: Internet access is as expected difficult and slow here. So I'll post a bit from time to time if I can but I won't really catch up and am not expecting to upload photos until I am back home. Meanwhile….)

Leading a group is never an easy undertaking. But getting checked in for a charter flight to Havana is another thing entirely. Mi amigo, Fabrizio, did not want to deal with everyone individually. So I found myself on the floor in the terminal at 5AM gathering together the required documents from each bleary-eyed delegate:  Passport, check. Visa, check. Travel affidavit, check. Airline ticket. Check.

Then a coffee break at the conveniently located Dunkin Donuts waiting for Fabrizio to call me back over to give me the return airline vouchers and another document requiring each delegate's signature. So commences the handing out of said documents to each delegate. Check. Then the gathering up again of the signed documents. Check.

Then each individual still had to check in at the counter to get their boarding pass and to check their bags so I helped the woman at the counter locate each person and get them through that process so they could go stand in line to wait again to be called in order to pay the $20 (take your bag to the airplane special fee) plus any charge for extra weight. (A total allowed weight of 44 lbs turns out to not be all that much.)

All in all checking in for the flight required 2 hours so that the 5A start for a 9A flight no longer seemed quite so insane. Plus, as an added benefit, if you need to attach faces to names of 20 new friends as quickly as possible, all of that handing out and collecting of documents turns out to be an extremely effective tool!

In the end, we all made it onto the plane for the short flight to Havana. I chatted in what I believe to have been reasonable Spanish to the wee, little old woman sitting next to me on the plane. (Do you live in Havana? My husband's mother was Cuban. He was in Havana when he was a tiny little boy but doesn't remember very much. And even, that it is interesting that in Miami everyone speaks Spanish and English but on the plane to Havana the woman (I don't know the word for flight attendant) only spoke in English.)

Anyway, they let us into Cuba. There's even a stamp (yet to be located) in the modern art project that is the mass of stamps in my added and added and added passport pages.

Of course, the first thing everyone sees when stepping outside for the first time in Cuba, which I think is because everyone is waiting to see them, are the classic, old cars that abound on this island. Granted they often sit next to a brand new Audi, but there is indeed an abundance of them everywhere you look. Some in seemingly pristine condition (at least on the outside) and some of them not so much. But clearly each and every one of them is treasured by its owner.

From the airport to lunch we mostly drove the streets of different neighborhoods in Havana. Looking at the gardens on our right or the hospital on our left. But barely 15 minutes into the drive, just as we entered an intersection PELIGROSO (a big roundabout), the bus died. Yup, really. I kid you not. The great thing about it was that it was so perfectly fitting. Here we are in a world where all those old vehicles are maintained with spit and duct tape, and our bus died. So our driver took off his shirt, neatly folded it and set it aside, pulled out a good-sized piece of cardboard that was conveniently stored on the bus, and set about fixing the bus. He located the problem as a break in the accelerator cable, spliced it together with lord knows what, tucked the cardboard away, donned his clean shirt again, and we were off in less time than it would take AAA to respond to your cell phone call in the States. It couldn't have been a more apropos start to the experience if it had been carefully orchestrated.