With no death dreams that night I woke up refreshed and ready for the 9am breakfast in which the flies from yesterday had informed their kin which made it very tedious trying to eat. Showering and getting dressed, Matt was suffering from lack of sleep (possibly still catching up with him from Trinidad) so we hung about in the microclimate of the room while we planned out the day. Finding out that there was actually very little interesting to do in Havana, we decided to head towards the Plaza Vieja which, according to the Lonely Planet guide, had some neat curios hidden away.
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I woke up this morning having dreamt about being stabbed in the mouth by a women with a maze tattooed on her face; suffice to say it took the fruit, bread and coffee breakfast before I was firmly back in normality and sure I wasn't dead. My designs for a device that shot flies with lasers was refined with Matt and I constantly barraged by the annoying insects. The shower in the casa was little more than a pipe extending from the wall in a wet-room, however it trumped all the other showers I had experienced in Cuba by actually spewing hot water rather than the tepid or at best, lukewarm the others had managed.
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A busy morning benefited from an early start wherein Matt and I knocked back a spartan breakfast, organised details of the casa with Madeline and settled the very reasonable bill for the casa which included five nights stay and breakfast and evening meals. We were then picked up by Matt's preferred taxi driver, the one who ferried him to and from Cassilda the past few nights who had the added benefit of being remarkably punctual. During the journey to the beach I continued to wrestle with the decision on whether to dive or not: whether to push and give it one last try or to simply resign it to the list of activities I had tried and disliked. I wished for divine intervention to relieve me of having to make the decision but it was to no avail and we arrived at the beach and the dive hut in plenty of time.
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The good thing about having a fully working and modern air-conditioning unit in the bedroom of our casa was the micro-climate it created. The bedroom could be a cool and calming zone, while even venturing into the en-suite bathroom meant you were faced with a not insignificant wall of heat. The bad thing was when the unit was right above your bed. This meant when I slept with the air-con on I had to press myself against the wall so that the cool air missed me as it was being blown out; regardless, I spent a lot of the night fumbling in the dark trying to turn the unit onto a lower setting which usually resulted in me turning it onto timer mode or switching it onto high-power.
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After a good nights sleep I woke up around 7am, showered and tidied the room before having breakfast. Our casa, like a lot of buildings within a Cuban city, is very vertical; while only two rooms wide, our casa was four stories high including the balcony and a cornucopia of side corridors and hidden rooms folding in on themselves. Our breakfast was on the first floor kitchen which housed an immense sink and cooker along with sturdy, tiled surfaces. Once breakfast was finished and Matt had showered, we were introduced to a man called Alfredo who looked like his skin had been spray-waxed directly onto his skeleton; angular without being dessicated. Alfredo spoke a wide variety of basic English and informed us that he could organise a trip outside of Santiago for us.
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