Time Travel – Havana, Cuba – [11/05/2018]

After all the trouble of getting here, all the hassle of the last few days. I didn’t know what to expect….

And yet…the world sometimes totally surprises you in the best possible way.

When you first step out into Havana the air wraps you up like a blanket, it’s wet and sticky and laced with the taste of cigar smoke and you feel somehow like you should be able to take a bite out of it.

And then you turn the corner into the Plaza, and your heart – if you’re anything like me – skips a beat.

I have never…seen anywhere like this before…

Never.

The guide books say that walking into Cub is like stepping into a time machine.

They’re right.

Here, there is no doubt that we are the foreigners, and there is no ‘stamp’ of us on the place. No chain stores, no fast food, no over priced souvenir markets. I saw a grand total of one person on a cell phone. Here, we’re the odd ones out. And it’s wonderful. And no one cares. The people are friendly and polite, but they don’t go out of their way to harass you or even really speak to you. There is no noticeable tension, although I am always aware when I’m in a foreign country, especially one where I don’t understand a word of the language (well, I can say hello and goodbye in Spanish, but that’s about it) – I never once felt in danger. Instead I just felt an overwhelming sense of …fascination.

Old Havana – and I’ve only seen a tiny corner of it – is a winding twisting maze of narrow alleyways and cobbled streets. Brightly coloured buildings shouldering up against crumbling churches like plants reaching for the sunlight high above.

And music everywhere, people dancing in the streets. Everything smells different, feels different. There is a … vibration here that I simply haven’t felt anywhere else.

The place is full of plazas and tiny hidden courtyards that spill over with fountains and greenery. And the whole city seems full of bells, small, enormous, cracked and whole, if they were all to sing out at once you would be deaf to the world ever after.

And then…there the San Francisco Basilica.

It’s a museum, which sadly is only open tomorrow, and we are only here today and this evening – I would give a lot to see the inside of it. Because the outside…I couldn’t stop staring at it. Nearly overrun with vines and crumbling in every corner…but still, if these walls could speak. I could have sat there, on the sunbaked  courtyard, surrounded by stones of monks long left this world…and just…stared…

There is so so much more that I would like to say, but…I don’t know that I can even find the rest of the words.

But this place…this…is worth it. Something about this place is worth everything.