Llegamos a Habana!

We made it! After a series of travel misadventures (by the way, for those of you I bothered with my luggage weight worries, the employees at the Nassau airport used their cutoff of 70 pounds, so my total weight of 66.5 was no problem!), we finally arrived in Cuba. Even in our 20 minute drive to the residencia, I could tell that the vibe in Cuba was very different from anything I’d ever seen in the United States. So many people outside on their porches, on the plazas and sidewalks, just sitting and conversing with each other. People here really take the time to foster personal relationships, which I guess is both a cause (in that some aspects of capitalism detract from that sort of personal relationship) and a byproduct (in that they only have so much free time to spend with each other because they’re unemployed) of their political beliefs. I think our whole group is really excited for the semester to come, and I don’t think we could have picked a better study abroad site; nothing could have possibly been more different and eye-opening than this.

Our residencia is fantastic: air conditioning, TV in English and Spanish (Entourage in español, anyone?), two meals a day… the list goes on. It’s still modest, but definitely enough of a haven to relish coming home after classes each day. Speaking of classes, they began the day before we got here (thanks, Ike!), so we’ve been thrown into everything full force… which luckily isn’t much here in Havana. We were told to just take our time deciding what to take, and that professors are extremely accommodating of foreign students (especially the Americans who understand maybe every third word of what they’re saying). So we’ll see how that goes. Most of us are interested in the same types of classes (i.e. anything having to do with Marxist thought), since there is no better place to learn such philosophies. So hopefully our foray goes well tomorrow, and we add an academic aspect to the learning process that we began the second we stepped off the plane.