Island life

I went back to the UK for Christmas and spent time hanging out with my family, eating all the food I can't get here, only arguing with my brother about the washing-up once (a family record for Christmas), feeling over-whelmed in every super-market I went into (who needs that many kinds of cereal in their life?), hugging my godchildren, catching up with friends and staying as close as possible to the central heating.

Christmas tree & time with my lovely dad

It was so lovely to be home, especially seeing the progress my dad has made and the news that his latest scan shows him to be cancer-free, hurrah hurrah. I spent a lot of time talking about life in Cuba with my parents, whose decades overseas have given them a pretty good understanding of the trials and joys of expat life and who spent an awful lot of time saying "Ooh, it does remind us of  Sri Lanka in the early 80s." It feels facile to say that life here is different - no shit, Sherlock, my brother would say - but time at home gives one the opportunity to reflect on what life used to be and how much it has changed. Mind you, one thing that has remained the same is the amount of time I spend on my balcony.

Blue skies, balcony life

Sometimes I miss Israel so much it hurts, but I genuinely love living here, not least because it is both a constant challenge and a delight. Lots of people have asked me lots of things about life in Havana, so I thought I'd try to do a little catch-all summary of my learning experiences thus far. Well, some of them.

• Island life, even in the capital, really is slower, more relaxed, more tranquil. The number of times I have been told "tranquilo, tranquilo' when trying to do something quicker than the pace of the average of Cuban...
• It's genuinely amazing how fast you can get used to things which previously you would have avoided like the plague. This list includes bananas, which taste different here and don't smell quite so appalling, and long-life milk, which not only do I take in my coffee but which I can drink by the (very cold) glassful.
• It is possible to eat too much pork. It is also possible to crave soft fruit, to rejoice when you find cauliflower in the agro, and to be conned into buying chicken for $10 at the market.
• The nice man at the agro-mercado who sells onions has finally forgiven me for the hideous faux-pas of pulling an onion off a string of them, because I only wanted one. I was so embarrassed I bought the whole lot.
• I am astonished by the proclivity of Cubans in shops to look at you, answer their phone, talk for ten minutes, then hang up, give you side-eye and decide, reluctantly, to serve you. And I thought Israeli customer service was bad.
• There continues to be music everywhere, particularly loudly in my neighbourhood on a Friday and Saturday night. 
• On a musical note, I have heard some truly magical stuff in the past few months. One highlight was an evening of experimental jazz, if it can even be called that, when the German embassy hosted two young Cuban musicians. There's a long tradition in Latin jazz of using the instrument as percussion and at one point I was astonished to see the guy stand up, keep playing the piano with his left hand and stick his right hand deep into the grand piano, plucking and banging the strings. Unreal.
• On another musical note, I'm now at the stage where I groan when I hear 'Guantanamera'. Buena Vista Social Club may have ruined that forever, for me if not for the millions of American tourists pouring off the planes.
• I flipping love salsa dancing. The classes I do twice a week, and the times out in town dancing of an evening, are one of my favourite things about living here. I'm doing well enough to get the occasional 'Eso!' or 'Aiwa!' (i.e. good job!) from the boys who teach us, which is a source of great joy because they are really amazing dancers, and they keep telling me how well I'm doing. Having said that, Alexey - who has taught me more than the rest - actually rolled his eyes at me last week when I got a step wrong.
• Being out and about dancing on the weekends requires at least one of the girls to take one for the team, by dancing one dance with the guy who can't actually dance but who thinks if he pretends he knows what he's doing, then he'll get to take one of the foreign girls home. Everyone else then gets to avoid them.
• The beaches here are really are picture-perfect. We drive most weekends to the playa del estes, beaches half an hour to the east of Havana, where the water is turquoise, the sand is white and a nice man in a sombrero brings ice-cold beers to your sun-lounger. You'd think my tan would be better by now but alas and alack for my fair, Anglo-Saxon rose complexion. And yet, there are worse ways to spend a Saturday or Sunday, staring into the turquoise horizon.

Cayo Santa Maria

Playa Santa Maria (similar name, different slice of paradise)

• Cubans have a very kissy-kissy culture. You will meet someone new and they will proffer a cheek for a kiss, much as the French do but only once. This leads to massive confusion whenever I socialise with European expats: is it one kiss or two? I'm not entirely sure, which is a bit awks.
• Further to an early blog comment about the way Spanish is spoken in Cuba, a venerable member of staff at the school told me that his wife told him that Habaneros actually speak Cuban-Spanish much more slurred and much faster than the rest of the island, making them much harder to understand. The best Spanish is spoken, I'm told, in the east of the island.

I do feel like I'm barely scratching the surface with this list, but it's late and I have to go to work early in the morning. It's only been half a year, and I'm acutely aware that I have a lot to learn, including Spanish (I really don't like not being able to communicate with people beyond the basics), and a lot of places to visit; I've barely made it out of Havana thus far but first on the list is Vinales, then Trinidad. I'm pretty sure I'll be here for a while so I have a lot more to experience and understand and investigate. I have to say that, thus far, I'm pretty happy with life in Cuba. 

And for those who like these things, one more balcony photo. That weird building that looks like a transformer is in fact the Russian embassy, designed to look like a sword stuck into the ground. Or a suspiciously phallic symbol of a Cold War empire in its crumbling heyday.