Day 2: Santiago de Cuba, Cuba

Phew. It’s already the second day, I can’t believe it!
If you can’t tell, we’re at Santiago de Cuba, Cuba today!

Olivia and I wanted to soak up as much local culture as possible, so we got up at 7:00.
We docked here at 5:40 AM, but I didn’t realise because of all the excitement from yesterday, I dropped dead on my bed and went straight to sleep.

I met with Olivia at Island Grill (casual dining) at the rear of the boat, had a quick breakfast of lots of fruits and assorted cereals. The fruit was so fresh, like I had just reached and plucked it from a tree! We ate in such a hurry, we only had 12 hours in Cuba, and we had already spent a good 3 hours sleeping and eating!

We zoomed out of the boat, and into CUBA! I bet that you could have literally seen the excitement radiating off both of us, we were so giddy!

We had looked at the recommended places to go, and decided that we should go soak up some local culture.
Where better to do that than their local market? So we headed straight to the Revolution Plaza (Plaza De La Revolucion), which is sort of like a town square, so if anything was happening, it would be happening there!

When we had reached there, we were astounded as to how modern it looked!
We took soo many pictures, I was afraid my memory card would fill up on the first day!

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I don’t want to spam this post with images, but there were just so many sites!
However, this place wasn’t too great for the shopping we had planned, if you can tell.
It does, however have an amazing significance to the area. There are many political buildings surrounding the area as well with the José Martí Memorial.

We asked around to find out what were some of the larger attractions around Santiago de Cuba, and we got so many reccommendations to go to a bar called Casa de las Tradiciones, but learned that you had to be a couple to go in. So we scratched that from our visiting list, not that I’m complaining. Personally, and I think I speak for both Olivia and I, I wasn’t too excited to visit a bar or club. Not my style. But, it turns out, that bars and clubs are one of the most popular tourist attractions… Ah well.
We decided to try one out for the heck of it, it sounded promising. We headed towards La Taberna de la Dolores, which from we heard, served some good authentic Cuban food. We were pretty hungry at this time, obviously.

When we got near to the place, we could tell it was worth the trip. The whole place had a very rustic and authentic feel to it, very very nice. We had sat down at a table, and looked over the menu. It looked very traditional, offering fried chicken, congris (black beans and rice; we asked), salads, fried and stewed pork, and pork cutlets. We asked the locals which would they would recommend, and they told us to try the chicken or the congris. Olivia decided to order the salad (she claimed she wasn’t that hungry), and I ordered the chicken. The service wasn’t top notch, but we didn’t mind waiting. It was hard to get bored sitting in a place like this, there’s too much to look at and something always going on! Take a look yourself!
I know it's rather small, Olivia was hogging my camera, so I had to use my phone.D:

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Sorry we didn’t take a picture of the food, we forgot! It looked too good, and we were so hungry we just dug right in. Olivia later regreted ordering just a SALAD.

We couldn’t believe it was already 2 PM, we had only a little less than 3 hours left! We decided we’d walk around the area, looking at all the local shops and culture.
We got tired about an hour or so after we started to browse, and decided we’d head back to the ship.
Don’t want to be late now, do we?

When we got back to the ship, we were EXHAUSTED.
We decided to take a shower before we planned our evening activities.

After feeling REFRESHED and RE-ENERGIZED, we decided to finish exploring the ship.
We still had a good chunk of the evening left, so we went to try a different restaurant.
We had picked Scoreboard, the sports bar, since we were still a little full from our lunch. We both ordered something light and munched on it together. (We both felt a little out of place.)

After that very short dinner, we decided to go to Studio B, the entertainment complex. We had caught the last show of the evening, and enjoyed it immensly.

Dead beat and tired, we returned to our room, too exhausted to explore anywhere else.
And we flopped on our beds and went straight to sleep, after writing this, of course. ^^

Tomorrow: Montego Bay, Jamaica!
Till next time,

Emii~

For extra info: [Santiago de Cuba, Cuba]

April 30, 2009. Journals, Uncategorized. Leave a comment.

Day 3: Montego Bay, Jamaica

We are so excited to go to Jamaica today! Even though the docking time was so early! However, we both woke up at around 9:00 AM in the morning, since we woke up so early yesterday! We had breakfast on the ship and left right after we finished eating. Once we got off the ship, the heat was immediately rushed towards us. We wished that it would rain! However, the heat did not stop us from exploring Montego Bay. We went to the famous craft’s market where vendors sold hand made items such as straw hats and bags, musical instruments, toys, platters and WAY more. This was such a great way to get to know the Jamaican culture! There was also a friendly person, who helped guide us around the market, as well as showed us how to bargain for various items! And he told us how to say “No!” to vendors. It was definitely a great experience, since we could actually feel the culture of the Jamaicans. We also enjoyed seeing the colourful buildings and paintings done by the local people. We even bought straw bags and some paintings that we are going to give to our friends and family.

Hand woven straw hats and bag

Hats

Colourful buildings

It was about lunch time, so the next place that we went too was Gloucester Avenue, where there were many restaurants, shops and bars. We went to Cuban Cafe for lunch and then we, once again, went out to shop! We wanted to take a break from shopping, so we went to Doctor’s Cave Beach, since it was near by. The beach was SO PRETTY. I had never seen such clear water before and the sand was so white! We made so many sand castle and we swam in the clear (VERY CLEAR) water! We even tanned under the sun!

The streets of Gloucester Avenue

Margaritaville

Doctor’s Cave Beach

At 5:00 PM, we boarded the ship, and we were so tired! But we didn’t even want to take a nap, since there were some parts of the ship that we didn’t explore yet. So we went to the spa where we got spa treatments! It was so relaxing, since we were half asleep! The spa helped to refresh us and sort of made us awake again! It was almost dinnertime, however we wanted to watch the sunset first before eating dinner. So we went up to the observation point where we watched the sunset. It was very pretty, since the waves and wind were calm, the atmosphere was just right. My stomach started to growl and we knew that we were hungry, so we went to the Italian Restaurant where we ate spaghetti and pasta. The food was SO GOOD! Especially the meatballs, since it was HUGE! It was nighttime and we were definitely not going to bed this early at 9:00 PM! We went to the High Notes: Jazz Club where we listened as well as tap to the beat of the music as the musicians play unfamiliar songs. However, it was very fun seeing a lot of people being interested in Jazz music. It was a very relaxing place where many people would definitely enjoy it! It is 11:00 PM and we went for a small walk around the track until we were EXTREMELY TIRED! I guess that wasn’t a very good idea! After that we directly went to bed! Now I can’t wait to go to Dominican Republic tomorrow!