January 25th

Today I awoke feeling partly refreshed, but I stayed away from the eggs, ham, and cheese of breakfast and stuck to fresh fruit. Apparently, I wasn’t the only fallen soldier. Four others in the group had gotten sick, and I was the only one who had overcome it so quickly.

We headed to the university for a tour with the head university historian, whom was not only funny but incredibly intelligent. For some odd reason, he singled me out to try out Spanish phrases on, and to help him up and down stairs. When I told him I was from Texas, he had me repeat the phrase “Me cayo los llaves en la calle” to determine if I had a Mexican accent or not (a non-Mexican accent might pronounce the y and the double-Ls as Js). It blew me away how much of a Renaissance man this historian was: he could quote Latin phrases of Aristotle and Socrates, he knew more about international relations than a lot of us did even though he was a law professor, and he was able to determine that I had a Russian face (Ukranian/Polish isn’t too far away), a girl was Jewish by her nose, and that another girl had an Ohioan accent. Whether or not it was true, he said he was good friends with Fidel, and told us some anecdotes about their times together.

This was also our first meeting with the UNC students. We all kind of felt like veterans already since we had been here for two days prior, and so we shared some advice, as well as scared the whole group with our tales of our sickness knocking out half of our own group. Apparently, several of the students flat out cannot speak Spanish, and although some of our students kind of suck at it, all of them know it quite well enough to get by.

Afterwards, we had the majority of the afternoon off, so three or four of us decided it would be a great day to go to the beach. Ariana had told us it would only take 30-45 minutes to get to the Playas Del Este, while a deskclerk said an hour and a half to two hours. We decided that instead we’d go to the Playas del Oeste, which while not as beautiful, were closer. When we hailed a cab, he insisted that we go to El Este, because it was mas Linda and only took 30 minutes. See what I mean about having to ask several times to really get the right answer? Thankfully he was right, and we were so excited about going to the beach that we didn’t mind paying the 30pesos (split 4 ways) for a roundtrip to Santa Maria. The beach was pretty much everything everyone had always said – blue, beautiful, and warm. Unfortunately, it IS winter, and clouds came rolling in and prevented us from playing in the water more – as well as the fear of man-o-wars, which were present, that had been instilled in me from being previously stung in Mexico. We were a little disappointed that surfing wasn’t a bigger deal in Cuba, because a lot of the waves were perfectly beginner/intermediate sized. We definitely planned to go back that Saturday however.

Upon our return, we attended a cocktail party/mixer at the Ludwig Foundation, an art depository/cultural incubator. Our now-complete group got to meet the rest of the UNC students, and like a middle school dance, it was extremely awkward. There was a lot of showing off on our parts to show that we knew so much about Cuba already, which was pretty lame of us. I talked to a med student from UNC who was mostly separate of their main group about a tour he took of a Cuban biotech lab. Apparently, Cuba is near the forefront of biotechnology and similar ventures and is giving the United States a run for its money. It sounded extremely interesting, and he was in a great position to be working with the Cubans to capitalize on the intellectual property they were creating. I also talked to Sarah _____ , the director of AU Abroad, about how she got her job and what she thinks about certain programs and such. I never realized how incredibly awesome her job is, but she was complaining that as she got older it was getting a lot harder to do because of the odd amounts of time she spent abroad and then having to come back and take care of loads of administrative tasks. We also met our professors and were encouraged to talk to them further, but I refrained out of intimidation.

We planned to later meet up with the UNC students to go out to a club. The certain club was chosen by a Cuban at the UNC residence, and I really should’ve recognized that I wasn’t feeling well again and taken the night off, because I didn’t feel like drinking nor dancing, so I mostly sat in a corner and moped for the evening. The club kind of sucked too – it started off with decent rap and reggaeton, then there was an intermission for a bad cabaret wherein the singer had little vocal skills and even less skills of entertainment, and when we left the music was in a solid hour long block of techno. Definitely not the salsa or rumba or any kind of Latin American flavor we were looking for. We headed back to the residence and turned in for the night around midnight.