Epicuriosity

Thursday May 27th

We slept in a little today, maybe too much birthday fun last night. After our breakfast of guava, pinnaple juice and boiled eggs we headed to Cienfuegos to meet more cousins!
Cienfuegos is about the size of downtown Birmingham, but instead of tall, new buildings, all the streets are lined with gorgeous French Colonial architecture. It’s suppose to be the cleanest town in all of Cuba. Lots of tourism, shops and restaurants.
My cousin lives in an old colonial townhome about 1200 square feet. This is the biggest house we’ve been in our whole trip.

One of my cousins lives in London, but has been living in Cuba with his family for six months. It was nice to talk about Cuba and it’s pros and cons of the country, government, etc with someone who speaks perfect English and has a Cuban and Eurpoean viewpoint.
Lunch was the fanciest we’ve had the entire trip! All the plates matched, we had forks, knives and spoons (though still no napkins) and we even had a Cuban version of pizza! To top it off we had the BEST strawberry ice cream I have ever had….ever. All other desserts we’ve had in Cuba consisted of homemade cheese and marmalade which is really good, but oohhh this ice cream was a real treat!
Before we went for a walk around town I checked out the bathroom. YES!! A REAL working toilet! With toilet paper! I have thoroughly enjoyed the experience of pulling strings or pouring buckets of water down the toilet to make it flush,  but having a real toilet, pizza and ice cream in one day….SCORE!!
Cienfuegos is beautiful. The ocean is many shades of blue and there are mountains in the background.

 Fancy little bed and breakfasts line the streets and the some gorgeous trees I have never seen before. This is definitley the part of Cuba that Fidel wants the tourists to see.

We headed back to Palmira and ended our “tourista” part of the day by taking photos of the town center.

When we got back to my tio’s house we found out there were TWO different houses making us dinner. It’s our last family dinner before heading back to Havana and everyone wanted us at their house. How do we do this without offending anyone?

Mark and I stayed at my tio’s for dinner and my dad headed down the street to another uncle’s house for dinner. There. Surely that will work.
Watching my family prepare the dinner was so amazing. We watched them pick the rocks and other nonedible stuff out of their rationed rice, saw plantains cut right out of the tree and corn from the field cut off the cob. I even got to see all the cows come in from pasture for the night. I can’t believe the things you miss out on and take for granted when you live in a US city.
This is our last night in el campo and I wouldn’t have spent it any other way. I could go on and on about the political and economic conversations in Spanglish we had over dinner (my spanish is actually pretty good now and my cousin has been practicing his english all week), but I’m running out of pages in my journal.
I had no idea that Americans are portrayed so badly by the government ran media. Apparently everything is wrong in all other countries of the world, but Cuba is doing great. This is the crap that’s being fed to the population through television. My cousins didn’t know of our economic crisis, the unemployment problems or even the concept of mortgages and car loans. I’m also pretty his knowledge of 9/11 is limited because he just shook his head when we were talking about it and then asked me “what is Muslim”. We’re talking about a well educated, intelligent hydro-electric engineer!
He said he always heard Americans are bad, but after meeting us he knows that isn’t true. I explained to him that America does not hate or even dislike Cuba. It’s their dictator that is the problem. Americans want to help the Cuban people (or at least the americans I know) but as long as the Castros are in power I don’t think we’ll be able to do anything to help.

Meanwhile my 94 year old uncle is shaking his fist and cussing Fidel and his politics. Something he can never do outside of his home.
We’ve learned so much about this country! It amazes me that the inconsiderate, selfish, brainwashing liar hasn’t been shot yet! I guess now we know why guns are illegal in Cuba.