Cuba Day 6: Oh the places you'll go!

Breakfast was good, though by the time we got our check it was already time for lunch. Whether this was them trying to trap us in an endless meal loop (breakfast turns to lunch turns to dinner turns to breakfast..) or it was just slow service, it's hard to say.

Unlike American restaurants, the Cubans are in absolutely no hurry to turn tables over. Servers would drop our food off then disappear for good, leaving us waiting for the check for a good while (...we're doing more waiting than them. Who are the real waiters here?...) Dickie pointed out that perhaps there was some sort of Cuban custom to signal you were done with your food that we might have been missing. We tried everything -- stacking menus didn't work, piling cutlery on our plates didn't work, putting our napkins in a pile didn't work. Our most effective method, which was still not very effective, was to finish our meal in a standing position:

Today was beach day, and after standing all morning we were looking forward to lounging in the sand under the hot Cuban sun. Not many taxis were around, however, and the ones that were didn't want to make the 30+ minute trek to the beach. That's when Mike devised a genius plan: Where are the most cars per minutes? The highway! Claro!

We walked over to the highway to try to get a taxi to pull over. Any taxi that pulled over for us on the highway, we reasoned, would be nutty enough to take us to the beach. Genius.

The plan worked! After 15 minutes of hailing we hooked a taxi. What we hadn't accounted for in our plan, however, was that obviously the nutty taxi driver would be driving a Slinker (see: Day 5). Beggars can't be choosers, though, and neither could we.

The driver's sheen was an early sign that the highway taxi was a mistake. As the driver put the car into gear, light glistened off of his sweaty skin as if he were a disco ball that knew how to drive stick shift. The windows didn't work, the A/C was broken, and the day was hot. Dickie and I sat in the back of the hotbox, while Mike passed himself out. He later explained that falling asleep was a survival tactic his body employed automatically in order to endure the extreme conditions. We got out of the car dripping in sweat:

Finally at the beach, we grabbed some beers and some rum coconuts, took out our books, and got to sunbathing. Dickie had become acclimated to the heat in the hotbox ride, however, and so he did the type of sunbathing where you fall asleep with all of your clothes and your socks and your shoes on, and use only half of the chair and none of the towel:

After a relaxing day at the beach, we carefully vetted a ride proper ride home:

On tap for the night was Fábrica de Arte Cubano, a must-see according to our many friends who gave us recommendations (thanks, many friends!) The place is a giant warehouse with windy corridors and ladders and stairwells that lead from one room to the next. Some rooms are dancey bars playing American rap, others are art galleries, and others still are open-air lounges -- awesome vibes all around. We chose to spend most of our night in the cafeteria room, where there was a huge line to get food. By the time we reached the front, we wanted to make the wait worthwhile and so we ordered three entrees a piece, nine total. It was one very round night!

Pictured above is Mike with our many many entrees. We would finish them all! Wow!

Also, despite our many objections Dickie still pronounces the currency here, the CUC, with two soft C's ("soose") instead of hard ones ("kook"). Smh.