Paper-Palooza: the beginning of the end

Hello, everyone! So my countdown says we're almost at the two-week mark, and I cannot wait to get back to the good old US of A!

Currently, the Latin American Film Festival is taking place here in Havana, and all of the movie theaters are filled with directors, film aficionados, and curious Cubans watching tons of movies from all over Latin America! I got a pass to get into all of the movies, and there are daily schedules published of where movies are being shown, but I still have classes, so I don’t know how many I will be able to get to. Some of them look pretty interesting, though!

As for school, I am currently in the midst of working on papers (by “working,” I mean “procrastinating working”). I have to write two ten-page papers for my sociology of work and social anthropology classes, and a five-page paper for my history of Cuban culture class. I think once I get started it shouldn’t be too bad, but until that point, I am finding that writing blog posts and emails is MUCH more entertaining than researching!

This is not to say I’m not doing well in classes! I actually just got my midterm back from history of Cuban culture, and I got a 5!!! (YAY!) I studied so hard for that test, so I’m really really happy that I did well on it!

In other news, our dial-up internet connection recently got taken away from us, so we’ve been forced to use really really expensive and faraway hotel WIFI access. Ugh. It’s all good, though, because we had two months of really inexpensive dial-up internet access!

The big story of the moment, however, is the trip we took to Camaguey this weekend. We took a 10-hour bus ride to the eastern side of Cuba on Friday, and went to the beatification of Padre Olallo, the first Cuban saint, on Saturday. It was a crazy Mass, with tons and tons of people in this plaza in front of this church. Camaguey is the “most Catholic” province of Cuba because of the high concentration of Catholic churches (yay Catholics!).

At this plaza ceremony, they had a ton of Cuban priests (perhaps 100 or so) all up at the altar, and they gave a relic from Padre Olallo to each diocese. There was even a priest from Miami there! The sun was beating down on everyone standing up for two hours, and several people passed out. They were filming the ceremony to put on Cuban tv, and even Raul Castro was somewhere in the crowd watching! It was pretty darn cool!

After having a fairly chill weekend, we negotiated a deal to be driven back by this really tough-guy looking individual who was called “El Chino.” He had this really sporty-looking black Peugot, and we ended up driving back the 300 plus kilometers to Havana in this thing. It was hilarious. I suppose I’m getting used to the hilarity that is Cuba, huh? : )