As we near the middle of the semester, I am becoming more and more reflective of my experience here. I have developed a healthy addiction to watching Grey’s Anatomy and The Sopranos (on at 10 and 11, respectively, Tuesday and Thursday night). My friend Brigid and I have a running date to chill out in her room on those nights and watch those shows together, so you can imagine that I was very very surprised last night to find that Grey’s had been moved to 11!!! Explanations that Brigid and I reasoned out: Cuban tv programming hadn’t been adjusted to accommodate daylight savings time (we move our clocks back a week ahead of the US here), or had been adjusted to accommodate ads supporting Camilo Cienfuegos, a Cuban revolutionary whose birthday (I think?) was yesterday. I love
Ale, or Alejandro, the carpetero who works at the front desk, speaks English, so he often shares in my frustrations with Cuban life. Linda, our program director, was able to buy a dial-up internet connection, which is really slow but cheap (80 hours/month for 60 dollars, compared to two hours for 12 dollars at the hotels!!!!), and Ale was telling me how awesome it is that we can open up more than one internet explorer window at a time, because Cuban internet is SO SLOW. I cannot wait to get back to pervasively extensive wireless internet access at Harvard (I could probably get internet access in a school bathroom, it’s that extensive). Gosh, that seems so many worlds away!
In school news, I recently got my first grade on a paper (eek!) which was a four (out of five!) for a paper I wrote on Karl Marx’s Eighteenth Brumario of Louis Bonaparte. It was a ridiculous 86 page document that I found online in English, and I wrote a seven-page paper on it in Spanish. I’m just so happy I did well! (Thank God!!!).
As far as the beautiful weather goes, it has been delayed temporarily due to a cold front that came in. It’s basically 70 and breezy, but Cubans are freezing. I just laughed, thinking of how it was like a
Anyway, things are going pretty well and I’m starting to miss home more as we reach the halfway mark of the program. I can’t wait to get back to my family, singing with the Callbacks, working with the library, and visiting all my friends on campus. It’s crazy that I have already been here so long, and gotten so used to Cuban-style living. I’m just craving highly capitalist products, such as Starbucks, Dunkin’ Donuts, Barnes and Noble, etc. It’s funny what almost two months without chain stores signs does to one’s psyche! There are definitely the beautiful parts of the socialist system, don’t get me wrong, but I still miss the ability to have access to any material that one wants without having to wait for it to be in stores.
Sometimes, I really want a certain item from a store, such as the lemon-lime national-brand soda, and it won’t be available in stores. Or, sometimes the power just goes out for indeterminate amounts of time. The resources here are very limited, and cut out without explanation or knowledge of when they will come back. I like the surety of the
Take care you all, and God Bless!! : )
2 comments:
Absence makes the heart grow fonder. Your grandfather used to say that it was unfortunate that his children and grandchildren did not know what it was like to be deprived of food and resources. It makes you view life differently. I so look forward to greeting you at the airport next month! Love always,
MOM
WE MISS YOU TOOOO!!
glad to hear you're doing well and staying up to date on KEY shows hehe so we can do greys when you get back and be on schedule ;p
take care,
<3 lin
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