My parqueador is in love with me
After five years in Jerusalem, my driving could best be described as pushy, if not aggressive. It had to be in order to cope with the general chaos of Israeli roads, where you knew when the lights had changed because the people behind you started honking if you hadn't shot off the mark like a Formula One car and where, apparently, the fast lane was secretly reserved for wankers who repeatedly flashed their lights at you as they drove a metre behind your bumper. Since I got my wheels here, I have found that driving in Cuba requires a totally different skill set.
Firstly, let me disabuse you of the notion that all Cubans drive beautiful 1950s Chevrolets and Mustangs. Those are here, for sure - someone in my building has a beautiful purple one parked in the space next to my big butch 4x4 - but they are not what the majority of Cubans drive. There's a whole range, from brand new imports from south-east Asia to the aforementioned beautiful 1950s cars that are mostly used to drive tourists around la Habana, to 1970s Lada that look like blocks of wood on wheels and that are not exactly speed-mobiles. Whilst variety is certainly the spice of life, you're never quite sure what the car in front, to the side or behind you is going to be capable of doing. This does of course fit broadly into my grandpa's first rule of driving, namely that you should assume that everyone else on the road is an absolute idiot and drive accordingly.
Secondly, it so happens that the roads in Cuba aren't actually that full and those on the roads are perhaps a little less aware of general traffic norms. For example, a hand waving lazily out of a driver-side window can mean 'please over-take' but can also mean 'I'm pulling out whether you slow down or not, sunshine'. A car horn being honked can mean anything from 'I'm here, by the way' to, presumably, 'What are you doing on the same road as me?' to 'I like your sunglasses'. I'm still not entirely sure why people are honking their horn at me, so am working on the basis that I've breached some unknown-to-me Cuban traffic law and try to slow down/get out of the way as appropriate. Grandpa's maxim still applies though, so I work on the basis that I need to give everyone a wide berth most of the time and am trying to drop my more aggressive driving habits, forged in the crucible of driving on Israeli motorways, in favour of a more patient approach.
I still find the comparative lack of traffic amazing and, most of the time, rather nice actually. My morning drive's equivalent of a traffic jam is having to wait for a minute to traverse Avenida 3ra as there is - shock horror - a car coming down it. Even getting into Habana Vieja is traffic and therefore hassle-free, except for the corner at the far end of the Malecon where they're building a new hotel and the traffic builds up to be six or seven-cars deep at the lights. It makes the drive out of Jerusalem, doing battle with the buses near the central bus station and dodging the lunatics trying to overtake downhill, seem like a distant nightmare. Having said that, the further you get into the countryside the more you find yourself dealing with traffic consisting of horses and carts, plus the occasional gaucho on horseback, which adds a whole extra dimension to keeping safe on the road. This when you're not dodging stray dogs that try to bite your tyres.
Thirdly, Cuban pedestrians seem to have a death wish of some kind which drives them to a) step out into oncoming traffic, b) assume that they have right of way all the time and c) make helpful gestures as you drive past. For example, my car (a Renault Duster) has that thing where the lights are always on low-beam - for the record, no I don't know how to switch it off - and so I frequently having people making the open/shut fingers gesture to let me know, if I didn't already, that my lights are on. I find it a little irritating, if I'm honest, and I'm strongly tempted to paint 'I know my lights are on' in Spanish on the windscreen. Even if they're not helpfully pointing out the lights thing, they like to make gestures and yell stuff as you drive by. Or they like to take their sweet time crossing the middle of a highway with an 80-km speed limit. Or they like to walk in the slow lane of the motorway, after dark, with their extended family and pets, forcing a rapid slamming on the brakes and some fairly colourful language from the driver. It sometimes feels like a bad game of Russian roulette every time you head out on the roads.
And fourthly - and thus to the central point of this blog post - there are people, usually men, at all shops/restaurants/agros called parqueadors. Ah, the parqueadors. They wear a red coat (polyester?) and they are there to keep an eye on your car, supervise the parking situation and, if they deem it necessary, to tell you how to parallel-park. As someone who learned how to drive in Bristol, where parallel parking is something of an art form, I find it immensely irritating to have a man standing behind my car waving at me as I park with a patient, long-suffering look on his face, denoting that he'll help the foreign lady park as necessary, which turns to a look of grudging amazement when I manage to park without scratching my car or injuring any passing pedestrians. They're more helpful when exiting busy parking areas as they stand in the road and gesture for you to come out when the traffic's clear, but as point number two mentions there isn't that much traffic so they don't need to spend too much time doing that.
You are supposed to give them a little payment, though paying 2 CUC for an afternoon's parking near the Capitolio in the centre of town feels like nothing compared to paying five quid for a two-hour stint at the West Quay shopping centre in Southampton. The fact that there is payment means that one's parqueador ranges in temperament from the mildly grumpy (because it's bloody hot outside and they're sweating in the sun all day in that red polyester coat) to the openly opportunistic (foreigner! let's try to rip them off!) to the ones that you see regularly who, once you get to know them, are really rather lovely. (I should, at this point, remind the reader that I find Cubans to be, on the whole, a rather lovely nation.) And so to the parqueador at the agro who we call Morgan Freeman because he actually could make money working as a Freeman doppelgänger, though his actual name is Albert. He's a lovely, lovely guy who takes very good care of us - watches our cars like a hawk, rushes over to help us carry bags and put them in the boot, keeps us safe from the guys flogging under-the-counter prawns - but things have taken an alarming turn for the romantic of late, as Morgan Freeman appears to have taken something of a shine to me.
I started to get a bit suspicious the weekend I went by myself (not with Georgie, my usual Saturday shopping partner) and he invited me to go rumba dancing with him. Two weeks later, as he waved me off, he told me that he loved me. Last week he told me how beautiful I am - which is sweet, but on a Saturday morning at 8 am with my hair scraped back and my sloppiest clothes on I find myself slightly puzzled by the depth of his devotion. I'm not entirely sure how much longer I can keep fending off the declarations of adoration and invitations to go dancing, but given that he's the best parqueador in town I can't adopt the Israeli approach to unsolicited male attention (ta'azov oti ba sheket, or leave me well alone, said in your loudest, stroppiest voice) and so have chosen the 'I don't speak Spanish' approach and feign a lack of understanding.
So. My parqueador is in love with me. At least, unlike most Cuban men, he doesn't whistle or make lewd comments in Spanish about my physique, but it is getting harder and harder to dodge the bullet and I have to somehow - it's the best agro in town...
PS. Not many pictures today, so here's one of my newly-adopted kittens for the cat-lovers out there.
Firstly, let me disabuse you of the notion that all Cubans drive beautiful 1950s Chevrolets and Mustangs. Those are here, for sure - someone in my building has a beautiful purple one parked in the space next to my big butch 4x4 - but they are not what the majority of Cubans drive. There's a whole range, from brand new imports from south-east Asia to the aforementioned beautiful 1950s cars that are mostly used to drive tourists around la Habana, to 1970s Lada that look like blocks of wood on wheels and that are not exactly speed-mobiles. Whilst variety is certainly the spice of life, you're never quite sure what the car in front, to the side or behind you is going to be capable of doing. This does of course fit broadly into my grandpa's first rule of driving, namely that you should assume that everyone else on the road is an absolute idiot and drive accordingly.
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| Not my car, alas |
I still find the comparative lack of traffic amazing and, most of the time, rather nice actually. My morning drive's equivalent of a traffic jam is having to wait for a minute to traverse Avenida 3ra as there is - shock horror - a car coming down it. Even getting into Habana Vieja is traffic and therefore hassle-free, except for the corner at the far end of the Malecon where they're building a new hotel and the traffic builds up to be six or seven-cars deep at the lights. It makes the drive out of Jerusalem, doing battle with the buses near the central bus station and dodging the lunatics trying to overtake downhill, seem like a distant nightmare. Having said that, the further you get into the countryside the more you find yourself dealing with traffic consisting of horses and carts, plus the occasional gaucho on horseback, which adds a whole extra dimension to keeping safe on the road. This when you're not dodging stray dogs that try to bite your tyres.
Thirdly, Cuban pedestrians seem to have a death wish of some kind which drives them to a) step out into oncoming traffic, b) assume that they have right of way all the time and c) make helpful gestures as you drive past. For example, my car (a Renault Duster) has that thing where the lights are always on low-beam - for the record, no I don't know how to switch it off - and so I frequently having people making the open/shut fingers gesture to let me know, if I didn't already, that my lights are on. I find it a little irritating, if I'm honest, and I'm strongly tempted to paint 'I know my lights are on' in Spanish on the windscreen. Even if they're not helpfully pointing out the lights thing, they like to make gestures and yell stuff as you drive by. Or they like to take their sweet time crossing the middle of a highway with an 80-km speed limit. Or they like to walk in the slow lane of the motorway, after dark, with their extended family and pets, forcing a rapid slamming on the brakes and some fairly colourful language from the driver. It sometimes feels like a bad game of Russian roulette every time you head out on the roads.
And fourthly - and thus to the central point of this blog post - there are people, usually men, at all shops/restaurants/agros called parqueadors. Ah, the parqueadors. They wear a red coat (polyester?) and they are there to keep an eye on your car, supervise the parking situation and, if they deem it necessary, to tell you how to parallel-park. As someone who learned how to drive in Bristol, where parallel parking is something of an art form, I find it immensely irritating to have a man standing behind my car waving at me as I park with a patient, long-suffering look on his face, denoting that he'll help the foreign lady park as necessary, which turns to a look of grudging amazement when I manage to park without scratching my car or injuring any passing pedestrians. They're more helpful when exiting busy parking areas as they stand in the road and gesture for you to come out when the traffic's clear, but as point number two mentions there isn't that much traffic so they don't need to spend too much time doing that.
You are supposed to give them a little payment, though paying 2 CUC for an afternoon's parking near the Capitolio in the centre of town feels like nothing compared to paying five quid for a two-hour stint at the West Quay shopping centre in Southampton. The fact that there is payment means that one's parqueador ranges in temperament from the mildly grumpy (because it's bloody hot outside and they're sweating in the sun all day in that red polyester coat) to the openly opportunistic (foreigner! let's try to rip them off!) to the ones that you see regularly who, once you get to know them, are really rather lovely. (I should, at this point, remind the reader that I find Cubans to be, on the whole, a rather lovely nation.) And so to the parqueador at the agro who we call Morgan Freeman because he actually could make money working as a Freeman doppelgänger, though his actual name is Albert. He's a lovely, lovely guy who takes very good care of us - watches our cars like a hawk, rushes over to help us carry bags and put them in the boot, keeps us safe from the guys flogging under-the-counter prawns - but things have taken an alarming turn for the romantic of late, as Morgan Freeman appears to have taken something of a shine to me.
I started to get a bit suspicious the weekend I went by myself (not with Georgie, my usual Saturday shopping partner) and he invited me to go rumba dancing with him. Two weeks later, as he waved me off, he told me that he loved me. Last week he told me how beautiful I am - which is sweet, but on a Saturday morning at 8 am with my hair scraped back and my sloppiest clothes on I find myself slightly puzzled by the depth of his devotion. I'm not entirely sure how much longer I can keep fending off the declarations of adoration and invitations to go dancing, but given that he's the best parqueador in town I can't adopt the Israeli approach to unsolicited male attention (ta'azov oti ba sheket, or leave me well alone, said in your loudest, stroppiest voice) and so have chosen the 'I don't speak Spanish' approach and feign a lack of understanding.
So. My parqueador is in love with me. At least, unlike most Cuban men, he doesn't whistle or make lewd comments in Spanish about my physique, but it is getting harder and harder to dodge the bullet and I have to somehow - it's the best agro in town...
PS. Not many pictures today, so here's one of my newly-adopted kittens for the cat-lovers out there.
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| Smokey and the Bandit |
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