First night

I hope you didn’t get the impression I was complaining about all the wildlife in my apartment, on the contrary, it was great, and they kept the mosquitoes at bay.

My first night in Cuba; my bed (a double might I add) was made of a big slab of foam and as it was a bit old, it had a big dip in the middle. So even if I tried to sleep on one side of the bed, I rolled into the middle, so in the middle I slept. I didn’t sleep very well that night and kept wakening up, strange place and all. Finally fell asleep only to be woken by something running over my hand, yes a dreaded cockroach, I chased it for a while and got it with my shoe, one dead roach, yes! Got back into bed and once more drifted off to sleep…….only to be woken by my phone going off, it was Marie sending me a text at 4:00am. She was going to work and thought it would be nice to send me a text, only about 9:00am in the UK and Cuba is about 5hr’s behind, so replied to the text and went back to sleep, just nodded off when….. an almighty growl, croak, noise!!! What in havens name was it, as I was not familiar with the wildlife around the school, it could have had big teeth or claws. I know, big wimp, but I had never heard a noise like it and when you have not had much sleep, well you tend to imagine all sorts.  I searched the room and found nothing, looked all over the apartment, still nothing, well back to bed as it had stopped and all was quiet. Well the noise continued sporadically for the rest of the night until dawn, my eyes must have been a bit bloodshot, what a night.

As I opened the curtains in the bedroom, there looking down at me from the top of the air-conditioning unit was a beautiful green tree frog, and just to make its point it made one more growl, croak, noise, just to let me know who was boss……

 My first breakfast was interesting, met up with Paul, my boss, who was teaching with me, and we both went to breakfast. Over to the canteen and queued up for my first breakfast, one spoon of scrambled egg, two dry melba toast, one small bun, a slice of processed meat and a small butter. We put this onto our table and got our coffee, water and cutlery, if we were lucky we could also have a florescent liquid that tasted of watered down sherbet and a glass of yogurt, which was delivered from a plastic sashay type bag. For country that has very little, I can’t complain so far, maybe not the Ritz but its more than the locals get.