Cuba Bound: Day 3

Dad and I got up early and went for a two mile walk before breakfast. I love walking in these neighborhoods and just taking it all in. If you are going to walk anywhere in Havana you must be on the lookout for two things.... cars and potholes. Even on the sidewalk it was nothing to walk over very uneven sidewalks only to find a two feet deep hole right in front of you. If you are in the street even between crosswalks the cars have the right of way. You really have to look before crossing or you will surely get run over. At least you will most likely be run over by a really cool car! :) As long as you paid attention you could navigate anywhere safely. The people were super nice and we never felt threatened in any way. We got back about 8:30 took a shower and joined everyone at 9 for breakfast.

Today we decided to ride the hop on hop off tour bus. That way we could see some places that we had not seen all from the top of an open air bus. We were able to hop on about a block from our location for 10 CUC. This would let us ride on it all day. We decided to go back to Old Havana and learn some history about Cuba by touring the Museum of the Revolution. The museum was great but I will have to admit I struggle with walking from room to room and reading all the information so I breezed through pretty quickly. I think it would have been better if I had learned more about Cuba's history before I came. If you want to know more, there is a great documentary on Netflix called The Cuba Libre Story. I just watched it when we got back and really wished I had done so before I went to Cuba. On one of the levels of the museum they had a gift shop and we went in to check it out. When we came out Dad had caught up with us and had already made a new friend. Her name was Cindy Lopez and she ran one of the gift shop tables. She spoke perfect English and had offered her seat to Dad while he waited for us to come out. We learned that she was actually in training to be a tour guide at the museum. Just one of the many super nice people that we met during our trip. After we toured the Museum we went to a nearby restaurant called Cha Cha Cha. It was really good and had a cool vibe inside. It was on the touristy side but good all the same. After lunch we decided to ride the Hop on Hop off bus back to our home and go to a market there. We hopped on the bus and started to head home. We did not know the route it was going to take so what we thought would be a 15 minute ride home ended up being a 40 minute tour of parts of Havana that we had never seen. By the time we got home we were ready to get off the bus. It had been an adventure for sure we saw a lot of sights and had to be pretty good at ducking the many tree branches that hit the top of the bus. When we got back we toured a local street market that had just about every tourist type thing you can imagine. They were actually closing up shop so we decided to head back home and maybe take a quick nap. While Dad and Julie napped Tim and I decided to go out and find the ever elusive WiFi card. It felt weird to not be connected at all day after day but it was also freeing at the same time. Tim and I walked a couple of blocks and the place we went to was out of them so we did the next best thing. We had a few drinks at a couple of the bars near our home. We got home in time for a short nap.

We had decided that we would head back down to Old Havana and try a restaurant that Julie had suggested called Restaurante Van Van. When we got there they were booked up so we got a reservation for the next night. After checking a few places we decided to have dinner at El Rum Rum. This ended up being a great choice. They had really good food and very big daiquiri's! They also had a couple singing live music that were very good. After a nice lesurily dinner we walked around a bit and came across an ice-cream place that Julie had heard about. Dad and Julie got ice-cream and said it was very good. The name of the place was Helad'Oro. Finally we called it a nightand caught a taxi back to our room. But this was not just any taxi. It was a 1937 Dodge! It was super cool and even cooler that my Dad was born the same year.We rode it back home and called it a night.