Cienfuegos

I need to apologize to all of you who read this – I’ve fallen behind. I’ll do my best to catch you up.

Three weeks ago we went to Cienfuegos. Cienfuegos is a medium-sized city mid-way across the island on the southern coast. The city is known for its nightlife and music as well as for being the most-architecturally uniform city on the island – a distinction that made it a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Thanks to revenue from that organization and from tourism, the city has been able to restore and maintain a large part of the buildings that make up the city core.

My usual travelling partners of Katie, Maeve and Ani arrived at Cienfuegos on Saturday morning. We checked into our subpar casa particular (the host was a sleazy man of about 50 who dressed 30 years too young and the rooms were dark and lifeless) and quickly left to walk around. There wasn’t too much to actually see in the city itself – the city does have nice late 19^th century neoclassical architecture, but there weren’t many buildings that really stood out to us. One that did was the beautiful home of a Spanish merchant on the far end of the Cienfuegos peninsula which was built in a striking Moorish-Arabic design with some neoclassical elements thrown in.

After walking around for a bit and finding out that the ferry to the famous castle on the other side of the Cienfuegos bay was broken we got lunch at the Casa de Sandwich. It was love at first site. I started talking to a big guy who let people in and out of the restaurant named Darien and he recommended the Cuban sandwich (ironically, the first one we had seen in Cuba) which had three different types of pork and cheese on it. It was absolutely delicious and well worth the 1.5 hour wait. We also made friends with Darien, who gave me his email and phone number. Little did we know that our lunch at the Casa de Sandwich was the first of many forays into that little restaurant.

After lunch we walked around some more and went into a little amusement park to goof off on the go-karts and bumper cars. We then ran into the other part of our group who had come in from Santa Clara that morning – Emily, Rachael, Lily and Zack. We got dinner together at the Casa de Sandwich (2^nd time – Darien was happy to see us) and then went to hang out at one of the docks and the malecon. There was a huge open-air party that we went to briefly before heading back to our respective casas.

One of the more decrepit houses in Cienfuegos

View from the Casa de Cultura of the main square

The next day we woke up and had lunch at – surprise – Casa de Sandwich. After lunch we caught a bus to Rancho Luna, the beach closest to Cienfuegos. The beach was gorgeous. I also got to play around with my camera and took a multiple exposure shot of Ani jumping around the beach.

We had a tough time getting back to Havana – the cab driver that we had arranged to pick us up did not come at 8 like he said he would; he showed up at 8:30 saying his car was broken and that we would have to wait until 4 am to leave. Naturally we were angry about this and went about trying to figure another way back to Havana. After trying for four hours (including two hours at the Casa de Sandwich where Darien tried his best to get us a ride from some of his friends) we finally gave in and arranged to sleep at our Casa till 4. We got up and ready to go, but the taxi never came. After waiting for an hour and walking to the bus station, we gave up and went back to sleep. We got up again at 7 and ran into the taxi driver from night before and I yelled at him for a few minutes before he scampered off and got us a driver who finally drove us back. It was a bad end to an otherwise enjoyable weekend.