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A Graceful Turn to the Future

24 Tuesday Jan 2017

Posted by lexklein in Cuba

≈ 82 Comments

Tags

change, classic cars, Cuba, future, graceful, Havana, La Habana, Weekly Photo Challenge

I was feeling unsettled about my trip to Cuba even before it was time to step onto the plane a few weeks ago. The inscrutable little island had been near the top of my travel wish list for years. It had originally wormed its way into my consciousness through my reading and the stories of Cuban exiles I knew and admired, particularly my thesis advisor, who is vexed to this day about his native country. Cuba had an aura of impenetrability – both physical and psychological – that made it all the more attractive to me as a travel choice.

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Suddenly, though, Cuba seemed to be everyone’s new destination, and I was feeling peevish about that and my own life situation. Getting in before now had required joining a group, and I balked at paying the exorbitant fees and traveling as part of a package tour, so I stifled my desire and waited. As soon as individual entry was allowed, I jumped to make a plan, but after a Christmas break full of sorting and packing, dumpsters and goodbyes, I was utterly exhausted and cranky going into the trip, so that “plan” was quite vague. Basically, we (my sister and I and each of our daughters) had two cities in mind and a few Airbnbs booked. Luckily, this works just fine in Cuba!

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My first surprise was finding Havana light on Americans, but perhaps we avoided them with our choice of accommodations and activities. The throngs of tourists I expected (based on fawning articles, recent Instagram photos, and Facebook posts, all brimming with classic cars and peeling paint) did not materialize in our neighborhood or most places we visited. We spent our first three nights ensconced in a seedy building on a bustling local street, our dingy metal door right next to a window with Fidel’s portrait overseeing a small display of outdated ladies underwear. We loved it!

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A second (less thrilling) revelation was the need to stand in lines. I remembered, idiotically, that this was actually still a Communist country, and we started the endless queuing before we even left the airport, spending almost an hour waiting to exchange euros for CUCs. We stood outside state-run establishments, and we warily eyed the disorderly hordes outside the Etecsa offices waiting to buy internet cards.

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All the waiting, then buying supplies at shockingly under-stocked stores, and then waiting some more – all with no wifi since we stubbornly resisted the crowds – helped us understand the daily ordeals of the Cuban population even as the new, secondary economy grows almost daily. There are so many signs that change is coming or almost here, yet so many reminders that it really is not. As a traveler, I wondered which one I wanted? And then I wondered which one they wanted.

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Those three days exploring Havana were my favorites of the trip. Our apartment in Havana Centro was forbidding on the outside, but very clean and comfortable inside. We were able to walk most places, including the Malecón (which we were lucky to see on the first day as it became inaccessible after a fierce storm on day 2),

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Photo credit: K. Klein

Havana Vieja and all its charming small streets and plazas,

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and central Havana (which included the most unique restaurant visit of my life – chronicled here).

View from our Havana Centro apartment

View from our Havana Centro apartment

We dined at a classic state-run place that involved over an hour’s line-up outside, made a failed attempt to tour the Partagás cigar factory, and took numerous taxi rides all over the bigger-than-expected city in everything from utilitarian and supremely uncomfortable Russian Ladas to chugging and wheezing 1951 Plymouths or 1948 Buicks with no door handles, seat cushioning, or in one case, windows.

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After a foray into the tobacco-growing countryside (future post), we returned to Havana to experience a different part of town. This was to be our splurge – two nights in an old colonial house in what was billed as Havana’s poshest neighborhood. We were giddy with excitement after our humble digs in central Havana and Viñales. We had booked a place that showed white columns, a manicured lawn, a small pool, and huge rooms in the Playa/Miramar area. We pictured ourselves sashaying into Club Havana in cute sundresses and gleefully ogled the few fancy houses we saw from the bus windows on the way back into town.

Expectations are everything, as I’ve cautioned in previous posts, and those cheap places in Havana Centro and rural Viñales exceeded them: Hairdryers! Semi-modern bathrooms! What a deal! About to pay four times as much money, we fantasized about the luxuries we’d get in this fancy house in its stylin’ neighborhood … we would see the pre-revolution lifestyle of wealthy Habaneros up close and personal.

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Good from far but far from good

Then we rolled up to the place. The columns looked good from the street, the grass was green, and there were some palm trees,

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but we entered our grand house to find mildewy rooms, cloyingly heavy decorating, open showers that sprayed the whole bathroom, NO POOL (filled in with concrete per government edict), no hairdryers, truly bizarre art (think wild cats in Shakespearean ruffles), abominable crumbling structures next door, few commercial establishments, and cold, gray, windy weather (the only part not their fault).

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Lounging by the concrete pool

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Our rooftop view

We salvaged the stay, finding another fun state-run outdoor restaurant nearby one night and paying 10 CUCs (US$10) for a day at the beach and pool at Club Havana (which looked nice enough but was eerily empty, with no visitors other than us and a middle-aged Russian lady in a bikini).

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After two piña coladas each, we were finally feeling like the socialites and celebrities who’d hummed along to Frank Sinatra here in the 1940s and ‘50s … until our driver rolled up to fetch us in his rattletrap car and we crammed in and bounced our way back to the casa to the beats of 2017 Cuban hip-hop.

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Contrary to some opinions and the fears of those who can’t get to Cuba fast enough, there was little to suggest that this place is going to change inexorably in the coming months. It can be both charming and maddening at the same time, and the quirks that make it that way are not going to be ironed out overnight, for good or for bad. Like one of its famous classical ballerinas, Cuba is turning slowly, carefully, even gracefully, toward its new future – no sudden lurches, no wholesale jumps into a new reality.

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It’s a fascinating place, and when I stopped asking myself why and when, or good or bad, it delivered. I was being a terrible travel snob, I realized, and all those colorful car and fading façade photos that had seemed like overblown clichés before I went were authentic representations of Cuban life today. As my daughter said one afternoon as we snapped our 17,000th photo of a classic car against a crumbling building, “This just never gets old, does it?”

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Out with the Old, In with the New!

15 Thursday Dec 2016

Posted by lexklein in Mind Travels, Travel - General

≈ 56 Comments

Tags

change, moving, new horizon, travel, Weekly Photo Challenge

Is it the nature of things (or simply me and my itchy feet?) that just as I have (semi-happily) settled into my newest environment that I should suddenly find ahead of me a tantalizing new horizon? Its confirmation awaits the final details … stay tuned until after the holidays on this one!

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Meanwhile, 2016 – an annus horribilis for me in many ways – is nearing an end. The year started in a fine way, with a trip to Bogota and Cartagena, Colombia, followed soon after by a much-needed solo trip to Nicaragua. Things were looking good – back-to-back Latino-flavored trips in my favorite kind of weather – warm!

Unfortunately, the latter getaway was bookended by (much) less relaxing journeys to take care of my ailing mother. February/March followed up with a relocation from long-time home Chicago to less-than-eagerly-anticipated Washington, DC., and the beginning of multiple back-and-forth drives between those two cities, usually with elderly dog in tow, for the next few months.

I did get a few kicks out of hoodwinking many of you for April Fool’s Day, and I also escaped to Aspen, Colorado, for a glorious string of days in the mountains, even as I struggled with sleeplessness (so not me!) in a bad bed, myriad frustrations in a tiny apartment with non-functional appliances, and a decline in health and fitness in my new urban lifestyle.

Summer brought another series of trips to and from the new DC residence, the old house in Illinois, and the parents’ house in Pennsylvania, but again, the stress of this peripatetic lifestyle, and worries about aging parents and dog, were salved by one of the most amazing trips of my lifetime – to Mongolia – chronicled in an embarrassment of posts in August. Two little side trips to Seoul rounded out that month quite nicely!

I bitched about DC more than I should have (in spite of landing a great new job at American University), lived vicariously through my daughter and her stint in Ghana this fall, and then finally came to terms with Washington by late autumn, just in time to contemplate leaving for greener pastures!

I plan to enjoy my family and our soon-to-be-listed home in Chicago over the holidays and just afterward, I will pop into Cuba for a week before facing head-on the next wave of changes about to wash over me. It’s all good – this time I’m up for the ride! Can’t wait to tell you more about it!

 

 

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Plus ça change, …

28 Monday Sep 2015

Posted by lexklein in Travel - General

≈ 43 Comments

Tags

change, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Nepal, Tibet

I’ve been thinking about change a lot these days.

After decades of living in one place, many of them in the same house, we are poised to make a move in the near future. I don’t know exactly where or when at this point, but the idea of uprooting myself is both terrifying and thrilling. Change is good, and change is scary, but having lived through upheaval before, I know that “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” I also know we can change our external surroundings, tipping ourselves precariously into new situations, but equilibrium always seems to right us, swinging us back to the mundane similarities of daily life, wherever we are.

Beyond the home front, I’ve been thinking about change in the world as well. As an avid traveler to some unique places, I’ve occasionally found myself in a hot spot, a place where climactic forces or social and political tensions boil over before, during, or after I’ve been there. The change in Jerusalem came to mind this morning as I read about clashes on the Temple Mount between Israelis and Palestinians. I was there this summer during a period of relative peace, and I spent some quiet hours in this sacred place one morning, feeling lucky to have missed the previous summer’s violence there. But just when we think things have calmed down, they can change in a heartbeat and erupt yet again.

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Likewise, I think about Nepal, where my recent photos and memories contain scenes that no longer exist after last spring’s devastating earthquake. Or Tibet, where whole portions of the Tibetan quarter get gobbled up year after year by the Han Chinese as they take over the mountaintop city. I feel like I was just basking in sunny, relaxing Croatia, thinking about little more than a cold drink on a ledge over the Adriatic, and today it is stressed by hordes of refugees at its borders. In an opposite swing of the pendulum, there is the heartening re-blossoming of economies and tourism in places like Mexico City or Colombia – cities and countries long excised from my travel list – now back on it after years of drug-fueled violence.

Durbar Square, Bhaktapur, Nepal
Durbar Square, Bhaktapur, Nepal
Photo credit: Aljazeera.com
Photo credit: Aljazeera.com

Sometimes I feel it’s a race to see parts of the world that may change before our eyes – like Cuba, where the inevitable influx of Americans in coming years may simultaneously revive and potentially ruin the Caribbean nation. I am eager to get there soon, before the change, knowing even so that the transformation will be both good and bad, and that it is not my place to judge that as an outsider.

More painful to me as a student of the world, I know my visit and my presence itself cause change in both positive and negative ways. By visiting the Arctic before it thaws, do I accelerate the melting? By walking through Machu Picchu before the government further limits visitors to protect the ancient stones, do I wear them down myself and exacerbate the dilemma?

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For now, I jump in where I can, keeping my conscience and safety in mind as much as possible, knowing that Mother Nature will continue to rumble capriciously through regions unknown, that politics and social forces will disrupt life in places we can and can’t predict, and that these winds of change will continue to blow through the world as they have for millennia.

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I’m a restless, world-wandering, language-loving, book-devouring traveler trying to straddle the threshold between a traditional, stable family life and a free-spirited, irresistible urge to roam. I’m sure I won’t have a travel story every time I add to this blog, but I’ve got a lot! I’m a pretty happy camper (literally), but there is some angst as well as excitement in always having one foot out the door. Come along for the trip as I take the second step …

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Dolomites, Italy – July 2023

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It’s a whole different world here in Hoi An after the grayness of Hanoi.
You can’t always get what you want … 🎶🎵
Souk Waqif was hopping at midnight last night! A few shops were closing down, but locals and visitors alike were out in force, eating and socializing into the wee hours.
Today we’re off to Marsaxlokk, a small, traditional fishing village in Malta. These brightly painted Maltese boats are called “luzzus,” and I couldn’t get enough of them!
Day 1 in Malta is all water and walls.
FINALLY made it out of the U.S. for the first time in 2 years. 😀🌴☀️

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Follow me on Instagram too!

It’s a whole different world here in Hoi An after the grayness of Hanoi.
You can’t always get what you want … 🎶🎵
Souk Waqif was hopping at midnight last night! A few shops were closing down, but locals and visitors alike were out in force, eating and socializing into the wee hours.
Today we’re off to Marsaxlokk, a small, traditional fishing village in Malta. These brightly painted Maltese boats are called “luzzus,” and I couldn’t get enough of them!

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