Cuba Slideshow

Arte de Cuba

Cuba's art, dance and music is one of the most well known things about Cuba. Whenever I thought of Cuba before I went, I pictured tons of dancing and music everywhere. There is a huge variety of music playing everywhere, the type depends on where you are--in taxis pop music plays, in tourist zones you can hear traditional music being played, in neighborhoods and homes it might be anything from Cuban rap or pop  to American rock or salsa. Art has received strong government support since the revolution, leading to a flourishing art scene, although there has been censorship over the  years. Throughout our travels we checked out several different art scenes in Cuba.

Cienfuegos

Cienfuegos, according to our guidebook "the Paris of Cuba." Our last stop in Cuba before before heading back to Havana and flying home. When we first arrived, we weren't sure if we agreed with our guidebook's statement. Our apartment was much different then we were expecting and we were disappointed. Chocolate filled churros helped turn our frowns upside down when we found them a couple doors down the next morning, although we learned that you shouldn't eat two in a row even though they only cost 3 CUP, an eighth of a CUC or about 10 US cents. We spent the rest of our day looking for what made our guidebook call Cienfuegos the "Paris of Cuba," sadly we never found what did.

Trinidad

Our second to last destination before we go home, Trinidad. Trinidad is one of the most well preserved colonial towns in Latin America. We are going to stay here for a total of five nights and six days. We arrived on Friday, after a nine hour bus ride starting at 6:45 in the morning from Vinales. Once we arrived we went straight to the nice house where we are staying. It is right next to a cool plaza, the Casa de la Musica, and a street market where my mom bought a hand embroidered table cloth. After getting our bearings, we went out to a delicious dinner where we got the first chocolate cake I have seen on our trip.

A view from our door

Cuatro Dias en Vinales

We spent four days in Valle de Vinales. The valley is surrounded by mountains that have limestone cliffs climbing each side, and are covered with a huge variety of trees. A very recognizable feature of these mountains are the mogotes, steep limestone outcrops. There are fields dedicated to farming tobacco, pineapples, and many other fantastic crops. Tons of chickens and dogs roam about the streets and fields.

The farms

Agromercados en Habana

Instead of stocking produce in the mercados, there are agromercados throughout the city. When we arrived in Havana, our apartment host Marko, told us that the agromercado near us was one of the biggest in Havana. In these agromercados you can find a variety of fresh produce and sometimes meat, it is a lot like a farmers market. Most of our breakfasts are made up of the things we buy from these agromercados - comemos mucho pina y bananas.

Agromercado

We Found Salt!!!

After being in Cuba for five days, we finally found salt. Our apartment had only a pinch of salt on hand, making me realize how important salt is. We searched the few stores we could find, but again, they only had tomato sauces, sodas, and laundry detergent. We even thought about taking some from one of the restaurants we went to, but decided against it. After being cooped up all day, since everyone seems to be sick with a head cold, we finally left the apartment in search of food and just as importantly, salt. Any who, we walked to a mini-mercado a few blocks from our apartment, found some cookies, spaghetti, tomato sauce, sardines, and.....salt! It was magical, we could finally add flavor to the eggs, rice, and beans we have been making at home. I was honored when I was chosen to grab a bag of salt from the sack that was lying on the floor. I reached in...picked one up....and my hand got covered in salt. I sorted through the bags of salt, but alas they all had a gaping hole on the bottom, leaking salt everywhere, but we had to get salt, so, I grabbed one, put it on the counter, and wiped the salt onto the floor. This wonderful experience was the highlight of our day...no...our entire trip. I'm sitting here now watching my dad make spaghetti, that I will put salt on, oh it will be so good.

 

Arriving in Cuba

After driving from Point Arena to San Francisco, flying from the San Francisco airport to Miami, flying from Miami to Cuba, and taking a taxi to our apartment in Havana, the Capital of Cuba, my parents, brother and I could all feel what a long journey we embarked on. We left Point Arena around noon on Saturday, and arrived in Havana at around noon on Sunday, a full day-long journey. The first thing I did once we checked into our apartment was take a four hour nap, followed by waking up around six and going to eat the most common food in Cuba, PIZZA. Yes, I wasn't expecting pizza to be the most common food either, but it seems you can find it anywhere...restaurants, cafeterias, street-side stands. Our neighbors even sell pizza from the back of their driveway, operating businesses from their house is a common occurrence. After our extravagant dinner we went home, several hours later it started to rain, and we noticed the wind was picking up. We couldn't latch our window shut, then the power went out, and our floor got flooded by rain water... We decided to watch a movie, maybe to distract us from the flooded floor, but the window kept swinging open, so my dad and I decided something must be done!!! My dad grabbed a water bottle, while I held the window making sure it wouldn't swing back and hit anything. He proceeded to "hammer" the latch shut, and we were content. My mom said "I wonder what it would be like if this was a hurricane or tornado?"

Thera Volcanic Eruption

by: Logan and Bryce

We spent our last week in Greece on the volcanic island Santorini. The volcano Thera erupted 3,600 years ago. After the volcano exploded the Minoan civilization based in Crete was destroyed and the eruption inspired a couple of myths.

The Cretan Bull

Before Minos was king of Knossos the people wanted a sign that he was worthy, so he prayed to Poseidon and offered that he would sacrifice anything he presented to him in the gods name so he could become king. So, Poseidon gave Minos a beautiful bull and he became king, but Minos thought the bull was too beautiful so he sacrificed a different bull. This angered Poseidon and he made King Minos's wife, Pasiphae, fall in love with the bull. Poseidon also made the bull rampage across the Cretan country side destroying farms and killing villagers.

Adventures Through Crete

During my travels through Greece my family spent a week in Crete. We flew from Thessaloniki to Heraklion and rented a car to take a mini road trip around Crete. First we went to Chania where we had our first bad experience with directions, but we made it to our awesome little house. We got to our house and the nice people we were renting from were waiting there, with freshly baked bread, little savory pies, and oranges from their orange trees (which we made fresh orange juice out of) - it was all delicious.

Fresh squeezed OJ in Chania

WWII in Greece

Original artwork from the war.
Displayed at Moni Megalou, Meteora 

Greece was greatly affected by WWII. The Italians wanted to prove that their army was strong and capable, so they decided to attack Greece because they thought that it would be easy. When they tried to invade, Greece successfully fought them off and pushed them back. The Italian failure forced Hitler to attack Greece and he succeeded. After the German invasion they stayed there for the whole war and made life miserable for the Greeks.

The war with the Italians in Greece started after the Italians torpedoed the Greek cruiser called Elli in the 15th of August 1940 in the harbor of the Greek island Tinos which killed tons of people. Then on October 28th 1940 the Italian minister in Athens gave a letter saying that Greece has to let the Italian army occupy its country or they would invade. The Greeks refused so the Italians invaded from Albania thinking it would be an easy victory, but it wasn’t easy or a victory. The Greeks fought back and in six weeks they pushed the Italians back into Albania. This is very humiliating for the Axis so to get the job done Hitler had to stop getting ready for invading Russia to go invade Greece. First the Greeks asked if they could make a truce between Greece and Italy, but on the 6th of April 1941, the German Army invaded Greece. The new Greek Prime minister, Alexander Korysis, committed suicide when the Germans invaded.

Thessaloniki

We just spent the last several days in Thessaloniki which is the second biggest city in Greece. In our guide book there was a walking tour of the city which included a lot of churches, this seemed like a fun way to explore the city so that's what we did all day. When we were done with the walk we went to a delicious bakery with tons of different desserts. Here is a little photo tour.

Our first destination of the "Tour" was part of the Byzantine Walls.
These walls were built in the 4th century B.C. until the Ottomans
destroyed it in the 19th century.

Meteora

We left Delphi yesterday by bus and had to transfer a ton of times. We finally arrived here in Meteora at 9:00 pm, it was raining and we got confused about how to get to our hotel. This was kind of a low travel moment, but once we found our hotel and got some dinner everyone felt much better.

Meteora is known for its monasteries that were built on huge rocks that have been forming for millions of years. The geology of these rocks is not completely understood, but it is believed that they started forming underwater and when the water receded they got eroded by wind and other forces. Today they are humongous rocks rising up to 400m with moss covered tops. They have curved edges from the erosion and black coloring on the sides.

Ancient Mycenae and Ancient Delphi

Ancient Mycenae and Ancient Delphi played a significant role in the myths of Herakles. Ancient Mycenae is where Herakles received his twelve labors after he went to consult with the Oracle of Delphi on what he should do to redeem himself for killing his family. We recently visited both of these sites.

Entrance to Ancient Mycenae

The Hero's Journey

A big part of my high school program at the Pacific Community Charter High School is a project called Passages. Each student picks from six categories and completes one or more Passage each year. The Passages include topics like Adventure, Logical Inquiry, Career Exploration, Global Awareness, Practical Skills and Creativity. You must complete all of the passages to graduate. I have chosen to complete the Adventure Passage this year. My theme is "The Hero's Journey" and my trip to Greece is based around that idea. 

The Acropolis

Something I think is cool about Athens is it's Acropolis. This Acropolis is so old its creation is shrouded by a myth.

When the people of ancient Greece stopped being peaceful farmers they started creating cities on top of places like the Acropolis. The Acropolis served as a very good defensive position for the time when all of the city-states were attacking each other for resources. The Acropolis lays on a big rocky ridge that juts out of the Attica plateau along with the Lykavittos Hill, which we climbed yesterday. The rock rises up over two hundred feet and has a length of around nine hundred feet and a width of about four hundred and fifty feet. 

We Are In Greece!

Hello everyone. As you know from my title my family and I are in Greece. We arrived in Athens on Monday after two long flights and little sleep. From the airport we decided to take a taxi to our apartment. Our driver had a hard time pulling up our address but we had faith he knew how to get us where we were headed. After driving through the maze of Athens' streets, he stopped at an apartment building, and we took all our stuff out of the car thinking the building was the correct one. We unloaded our bags, payed him and he drove away. We walked up to the building to ring the doorbell for our apartment but none of the names were correct, so we stood around scratching our heads and biting our nails for awhile (not literally, just metaphorically, although we did stand around for awhile) until our hopeful savior walked up to go into the apartment. We asked her if she knew where our apartment was, and she said nothing because she didn't speak English (and we definitely don't speak Greek) but suddenly another women walked up and she knew what we were saying and helped us. We thanked her and walked away following our new directions - go straight, then right, and then left. After walking around for awhile we realized that it should have been two rights, but at least we got safely to our new little home. 

Athens from above

View from our apartment

Map Of Our Travels

During our five weeks of traveling we took buses through the Yucatan and Chiapas and went to some pretty and cool places. We took a picture of a map of Southern Mexico in our Palenque hotel and also made a map of our route.

Map we made

Bye Bye Everyone

A huge temple at Chichen Itza

Yesterday was our last day in Mexico after five weeks of traveling around. It was mostly a travel day from Merida to Cancun, but we did make a stop in Chichen Itza for a few hours. 

Merida was where we spent the last 6 days of our trip and is a big city with tons of plazas and shows almost every day, and great food stands. We stayed in a little house several blocks away from a big plaza where we saw Noche Mexicana and ate delicious tacos. It is a really flat city but unlike Tulum you can’t bike because the drivers go too fast, although on Sundays they block off part of the city so we got to rent bikes and ride around. There were a lot of places selling hammocks in Merida so we went to a small shop and got a couple to bring home. The reason why there are so many hammocks around here is because Mayan women traditionally made them from the henequen fiber which was grown around Merida (now they are usually nylon or cotton). We really liked our small house in Merida and are glad we can hang out in our hammocks when we get home. 

The Adventure In The Cenotes

One of the moto-cabs

On Monday we went on a trip to some cenotes about an hour away from Merida. First we had to take an hour bus ride that was really hot because the air conditioning didn't work and there were a lot of people. When we got to the small town of Cuzama we took two motorcycle taxis (we're not sure why we had to take two because there were four seats, but what can you do??). We took the taxis to a little railroad where horse drawn carts would take us to the cenotes. Cenotes are big water tunnels and pools under ground and they are super beautiful and fun to swim in.

The first horse drawn cart stopped at a little rest stop for the horses. After a little waiting at the horse stop another moto-cab took us to another horse stop and we got on yet another horse drawn cart. The railroad ride was a lot longer than the first one but then we got to the Cenotes. At first I couldn't see the cenotes but when I got closer there was a hole in the ground with a stair case leading down. When we got to the water my brother, my mom and my dad all jumped in right away but I'm a wimp of cold water so I had to test it first, but after awhile I jumped in.