Day 1 in Havana

Friday saw us awake and down for breakfast when it began at 7am. The fruit was lovely - fresh guava and guava juice but the coffee was disappointing. We had a wander round and got back in time for the tour at 9am. We started with just the two of us on a 50-seater bus but but the time we'd visited every hotel in Havana it was a quarter full; this was 10:30! The tour itself was a bit of a disappointment. It was almost easier to understand the guide's Spanish than her English. Anyway we saw the Martí monument and photographed the Government building with Che's face on it without being told off by a policeman.






We also saw a lot of old Havana near our hotel, as well as more old American, not to speak of British, German and French, cars than you can possibly imagine. (More of this later.) After lunch we walked round old Havana a bit more, took some photos from outside the fence around the revolutionary museum until stopped by a policeman inside the fence.






We had dinner in the La Familia paladare which was up not one but two precipitous flights of stairs. These are privately owned so show more interest than government ones in customer satisfaction. It was supposed to be the second most popular restaurant in Havana but I wouldn't visit Cuba for the sole purpose of going. We walked back to the hotel through streets reminiscent of TV footage of Aleppo.