Cuba Day 1

And we are off to Cuba.  We left at 8pm on March 28th and flew to Seattle.  We had the red eye to JFK and then a morning flight on the 29th to Havana.  

 Waiting in line to change money at the airport.  It was a very long line.  As we quickly learned, NOTHING is quick or efficient in Cuba. 

 1st ride in a classic car

 1st lunch in Cuba

 This was called ropa vieja (translated it means old clothes). It was shredded beef and it was so delicious.  We ordered it a bunch of other places and it was never as good as the one we had on our 1st day.

Che Guevara, famous Cuban revolutionary (who is actually from Argentina)

El Morro

 It was crazy how the water changed from light to dark so abruptly. 

 Tanner and Garret playing with some street musicians

The famous Cuban ice cream place.  There are often very long lines to get the ice cream (and it wasn't even very good.)

The Museum of the Revolution was right by our hotel (we will go in it tomorrow).

 View from our hotel room of Havana

 The kids were so tired because they didn't sleep much on our red eye flight.

From Katie's journal:

So, yesterday was the day of all the plane rides.  We flew to Seattle (8:30pm take off) and Jon and Michelle were on the fame flight to Seattle.  The plane ride was 40 minutes.  Then, we flew to JFK (5 hours at 10:30pm). That was a rough plane ride because I couldn't sleep, which made my stomach hurt! I wanted to throw up, but didn't. Then we got on another plane to Havana (3 hour 30 minutes at 5am). I slept for an hour or so.  Garret, I guess, got motion sickness and threw up.  Here's the story:

Garret: tap tap, "excuse me"

Kirt: "huh"

Garret: "I need to go to the bathroom"

Garret sees that someone is in it, turns around and taps mom (who is in 1st class) and barfs in his hand and on mom and then runs to the bathroom that is now empty and throws up more.  He got throw up all over himself and mom. We landed safely and got our luggage.  But dad had brought a bunch of flash drives to give to Cuban kids and the people in customs thought they were "suspicious". So we sat in the airport for an hour and a half.  We went to our casa (house with the owners living in it and hosting us). We got lunch (pizza which wasn't very good). Dad told us to "imagine every meal in Cuba like they tried to make something, but there were missing ingredients." That was what the pizza was like. We then walked along the beach sidewalk.  The beach was pure rock, moss, and trash, so to my dismay, no swimming. We got ice cream after.  It was definitely a lot different.  The flavor options were: orange, vanilla, strawberry, strawberry chocolate (mom told us it tasted old) lards/busicut (Fidel Castro's favorite flavor), hazelnut and chocolate swirl.  Then we went back to the casa and got ready for bed. We were tired! Cuba is pretty loud at night, and we had the windows open to keep cool.  We slept for 12 hours.