Dynargh dhe'n Blogofrob

Wednesday 18th April 2007

Havana (Part one)

Casting my mind back to October and November 2005:

We followed the driver out of the chaotic arrivals hall, to the minibus outside. A surge of childish excitement grabbed me as I noticed a battered 1950s Chevrolet parked up beside it. So far, so Cuba.

Except that it was cold. And drizzly. The edge of Hurricane Wilma had brushed the western part of the island a few days before and the weather remained inclement. We drove through the darkness into Havana, and I had the strange sensation that we were entering a city underwater. I peered through the windows and caught glimpses of cars splashing by, shadowy buildings and figures under umbrellas, some of whom appeared to be carrying large decorated birthday cakes.

We turned into a small side street and found our hotel. Like many buildings, its windows were crossed with tape as a hurricane defence. In our room I fumbled with convertible pesos to tip the guy who had insisted on bringing our bags up to the room. It was to be the first of many such fumblings. Only in the States have I been more conscious of the need to tip, although in Cuba it seemed somehow more valid (although paying toilet attendants for a couple of sheets of loo paper may be an exception). We turned on the rattling fan. Then we turned it off again and headed down to the simple bar attached to the hotel. Under very high ceilings we were served mojitos from the heavy wooden bar, embellished with wrought iron. A four man band, all dressed in white, sang at us.

In Havana the mojitos are lovely. I have no taste for them in London - too much crushed ice, various types of over-fizzy and/or acidic mixer, in which a wash of detritus floats. Here, they are simplicity in a glass: sugar mixed with lime juice, a sprig of mint, soda, rum and a couple of ice cubes.

The following morning we woke to a still wet Havana. The narrow cobbled street outside reflected the sky. We stepped out of the hotel, avoiding a crocodile of school-children. Within a minute we were at the cathedral, a small pockmarked old building from whose recesses odd clumps of weeds sprout. From here we started wandering Havana's old quarter, a portrait of narrow streets, dotted with squares and filled with gently crumbling buildings. That day I grew tired of the wind and the rain, but in the days that followed, the sun emerged and the old quarter's colourful streets were illuminated. The brilliant sunshine swam over tall balconied tenements, covered in washing and bird cages. It fell on the chattering red-scarved schoolchildren, bustling Havanans, beggars and invalids, countless stray dogs, white-clad Santeros, a policeman on a street corner chewing a cigar, and everywhere, cigar hawkers and buskers ready to pursue you. Actually, pursue is the wrong word, although we were followed enthusiastically down the street by a couple of men, one with a guitar, the other with maracas. We had to submit, be serenaded and tip.

Music is everywhere. Almost every bar or restaurant we popped into in Havana had a band, who, after playing a few numbers, circulated amongst the drinkers and diners flogging CDs or simply asking for a few convertible pesos. I did get the feeling that perhaps that Ry Cooder's exercise in cinematic onanism, The Buena Vista Social Club, has affected these bands' repertoire. We kept hearing the same songs, and were often stopped in the street by hawkers promising to show us the Buena Vista Social Club, "where the Cubans go."

"Hawkers" also doesn't seem quite the right word: we were approached again and again by Havanans. Whether it was men simply murmuring "cigar" as we passed, caricaturists presenting us with a likeness they had just furtively scribbled, or people pushing tours of the city by horse drawn carriage, I was struck by the difference to the hawking that goes on in, for example, China or South East Asia. In Havana there is none of the relentless and cynical drive for the tourist dollar that occurs elsewhere. Some just approach for a chat. One day, as we were walking up to the Museum of the Revolution (where gun-toting waxworks of Fidel, Che and Camilo Cienfuegos burst through plastic bushes) a man caught up and accompanied us for a while. My heart sank in contemplation of what we were to have to politely but firmly turn down. But he just wanted to talk and, a few minutes later, waved us goodbye and headed in another direction.

Similarly, on a sunny afternoon we were sitting on the sea wall that runs along the Malecon, looking out at the Caribbean. I noticed two or three men lolling in the arcade of a broken down old house on the other side of the road, idly strumming guitars. Becoming aware of my attention, they wandered over with their instruments. After giving us the obligatory tune, I gave them the obligatory tip and changed some dollars into pesos for one of them. And then, they stuck around for while longer, just chatting.

I mentioned horse drawn carriages. We did take one, climbing on board in the lively Plaza del San Francisco, and glided down the road past the Havana Club distillery we had visited a couple of days previously and a bar next door to it, called The Two Brothers. Our guide told us it served the best mojitos in town. We went there later, and he had a point. But he knew what he was talking about. He lived over the water in the more industrial area of Havana, where he had a job as an engineer, but the one job wasn't enough to support his family and he supplemented his income carting the likes of Claire and me around. He had a healthy scepticism for the way Cuba was being run, and willingly pointed out the actual ferry that had been hijacked a couple of years previously by would-be defectors, noting with disapproval that the hijackers had been executed. We also chatted about music - he had been to see the Manics gig when they were in town. Had he enjoyed it? He hadn't heard of them beforehand, but liked them a lot. Then again, he said the same about Simply Red.

We clopped around Habana Vieja, past the train station, the old Barcardi building and the Floridita - another place where we later found ourselves drinking, alongside the lifesize statue of Hemingway, which leans against the bar. It's good to know there's at least one person waiting for a drink who won't get served before you. Perhaps the most eye-opening part of the tour was when we hopped off the carriage and were led through a local meat market, where the prices were all in regular pesos. The shed was full of punters and butchers. On the tables piles of red meat sat in the sweltering heat. Flies happily buzzed around and a couple of stray dogs sat under the tables, blissfully chewing hunks of flesh.

The stray dogs, by the way, are mostly inoffensive. They are all over Havana. On our first day we visited a series of squares in Old Havana, including Plaza Del Armas, which has a small park in the middle (complete with obligatory statue of Jose Marti), very green in the damp air. We were sheltering from the rain in the porticoed ground floor of a building, contemplating browsing the second-hand book stalls that line the square. A stray temporarily adopted us, sitting a few feet away, and then followed at a respectful distance as we nosed around the square. He soon lost interest and trotted off, as light a touch as the hawkers.

103 - posted at 00:55:42
permalink

Click here to add a comment


Saturday 31st March 2007

I moved to London almost 6 years ago. Back then, as I rode up and down in the estate's coffin-like lift, transporting my most precious possessions into Charlie's Swiss Cottage flat, I never thought I'd become one of those shuffling, cursing figures that could be seen wandering the Finchley Road, frequenting the tube, pubs in the afternoon and the vegetable section of Camden's supermarkets.

But today, I did. I stumbled out of the flat, light-headed and weak, from 6 straight days of a disgustingly messy stomach bug combined with lung-displacing cough, guaranteed to irritate the fuck out of work colleagues/flat mate/fellow public-transportees and girlfriend. After an ill-advised sojourn 100 yards along Oxford Street, my anger was suitably stoked, so when I headed into a Starbucks and ordered a coffee, my first coffee for two weeks ordered as a special treat to myself, and then had to wait for two minutes before having to decipher the following sentence:

"I am sorry, the machine is, because we have to close in 3 minutes"

it was maybe inevitable that my cursing and shuffling suffered a sudden and extreme increase. After berating those baristas I went to a second coffee shop, and there was angered by the barista's inability to listen to me or tell me how much I was meant to pay. By the time I sat grumbling on the tube I felt like Michael Douglas, but without the suitcase and shotgun.

I've said that my shuffling/cursing suffered an extreme increase. I should point out that I've been shuffling and cursing quite a bit anyway, for days, if not weeks, now. Maybe its the winter, maybe its the combination of my claustrophobia with a rush hour commute to Canary Wharf, or maybe it's just my general misanthropy, but I'm finding it increasingly hard to be a non-shuffler and a non-swearer in London. Is it time to leave? Is 6 years too much? Where to? Hong Kong? Another city?

I don't know. I want a dog. I want to be healthy and my shit to be solid again. I want a Glastonbury ticket. I want summer. But at the moment, I mainly want a blog to post before the end of March, so here's a few paragraphs of bollocks.

102 - posted at 23:37:19
permalink

Click here to add a comment


Wednesday 7th February 2007

Egotism Special: 17 Things I have Learnt Today

1. Tesco's own "Farmhouse Pâté" tastes nicer than it sounds.

2. My flatmate will be checking into a homeless shelter in 2 week's time.

3. South Park, Episode 1, Season 8 ("Good Times With Weapons") still makes me laugh on the third viewing.

4. "They" have covered Kentish Town Road in salt/grit in preparation for tomorrow's much-hyped snow dump.

5. I wish I was friends with Bill Bailey and Noel Fielding.

6. Even wedged into a dark corner on a Northern Line train, Lou Rhodes's voice can make you feel like you're the only real person in the world.

7. Women taller than me make me feel deeply uncomfortable.

8. The high street bank I currently work for has an email filtering system that picks up the expression "hand job".

9. Richard Jones off The Feeling doesn't know he's born.

10. The Feeling are from Horsham.

11. However wrong Starbucks baristas get your order, they'll always make it seem like it's entirely your fault.

12. I still love the Welsh accent.

13. After a few glasses of wine I'm pretty indiscreet.

14. VS Naipaul is a great writer.

15. If I take even a vague interest in what England do in a sporting arena, they will lose.

16. I'd rather be skiing.

17. Although their next album will almost certainly be yet more bollocks, I'll nevertheless be desperate to see the Manics live on one of their London dates.

101 - posted at 23:06:55
permalink

Comments (1)


Tuesday 30th January 2007

"Severe delays on the Northern Line due to flooding at London Bridge," the radio told me today. This was a little peculiar - it hadn't been raining and the Northern Line is underground at London Bridge. Perhaps a pipe had burst. About an hour later, as I was still struggling to get out of bed, the radio's warning had changed to "minor delays due to signal problems."

At Kentish Town I had to let one train pass, and squeezed onto the second that came through. It crawled through the tunnels, performing the obligatory inexplicable stops either side of Camden Town. 75% of the carriage exited at Bank, and I had a seat for one stop. At London Bridge I trudged up the ramp to the Jubilee Line, after noticing the commuters waiting for the northbound Northern line spilling into the main atrium between the tracks, bodies stuck fast in the narrow archways that provide entry to the platform.

I descended the steps to the Jubilee line platform, suddenly self-conscious. At the bottom of each staircase hundreds of people stood, staring blankly and in silence, as though they were observing a minute's silence at a funeral. At the front of each cortege a grim faced TFL man stood, holding them back with tape while facilitating a small gap through which I could pass.

I had to let two trains go before I could secure carriage. Ken Livingstone got off one of those trains. The bottom half of his face was completely obscured, from neck to nose, by a big blue scarf. I don't blame him.

100 - posted at 09:34:36
permalink

Click here to add a comment


Sunday 31st December 2006

Yes, it has been rather quiet over here. It's not that I don't have anything to say. I have a couple of blogs bubbling along, but I can't really get them right. It seems to get harder to say what I want, how I want. But, it's the end of the year, so I thought I should get something down and show vague signs of life.

Christmas was good, a much needed break from the exhausting daily slog to and from Canary Wharf. That's meant to end in April, and I really hope it does. Canary Wharf is like Hong Kong - but only the anonymous sanitised parts, which in Hong Kong were brief interludes in a vibrant, humid and continually engaging place. Canary Wharf is packed with shops and thousands of people. If you get claustrophobic around large groups of people, like me, lunch times are a nightmare. Stumbling through the malls to get a sandwich is a daily ordeal. I plough through, constantly weaving and dodging in a desperate attempt to preserve my, and everone else's, personal space.

Of course, Hong Kong was a highlight of the year, so I suppose it's fortunate it took up half of it. Japan, Lisbon and Los Angeles were also highlights. Simply reeling off those place names reminds me how lucky I am to be able to travel around so much, even with a full time job. Without the promise of elsewhere, I really don't think I'd be able to sit at my desk, day after day. The irony is that, without the job, I wouldn't be going anywhere.

For the cynic and the pessimist (like me) New Year is a time to reflect on how fleeting life is and how the years wither and die with increasing speed. To dampen my natural inclination to ponder such things, I have compared two photos of myself. The first was taken 9 years ago, in Six Flags Magic Mountain, a theme park just outside Los Angeles. Al and I are on a roller-coaster called the Viper. This year I went on the same ride with Les, and got a similar picture. Not much has really changed, just my hair length.

Viper 1997
Viper 1997

Viper 2006
Viper 2006

99 - posted at 17:20:27
permalink

Comments (1)