Tuesday, 8 March 2016

Communication

There was a cold northerly wind today, I almost had to put something on over my t-shirt, so we decided to go and buy presents in Trinidad.

This turned out to be a lot more fun than I expected. The stall traders do their utmost to sell you something but are charming and not so pushy that it's annoying. So we bought stuff and distributed some of our cash to the local economy.


We also went to the plaza to check our emails and see if I could get to my phone messages. There are so many quirky things about communications in Cuba and accessing my phone messages is a good one. In Havana I could call my mailbox and listen to my messages. In Vinales this suddenly stopped working as I couldn't get an international connection, at all, ever. At the more remote Playa Giron it started working again and I could listen to messages, and here in Trinidad it worked for the first day and then stopped. I keep getting texts telling me I have a message but the international number won't connect.



Connecting to the Internet can only be done in certain locations, usually a central plaza or a hotel but you have to first buy a card, with a username and password, which provides you with one hour online. The cards can only be purchased in certain places and sometimes the queue is massive. And outside of any major town or tourist area access to the Internet is not going to happen.

As a result we have no idea whatsoever what is going on in the rest of the world as our precious hour is taken up with receiving and sending emails rather than browsing the web. Like many things about Cuba this can be viewed as highly inconvenient or a kind of wonderful freedom, depending on your mood.

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