I know I left you on Day 1: Morning 1 and I haven’t had a chance to write in a bit because of the Yoga Journal Conference… But I’m back.
Day 1: Afternoon 1
Robert and I took a break in the middle of the day which consisted of trying to find lunch… which of course you know we failed miserably at except for listening to a great live Salsa band while eating horrible white rice. Yup… that’s it! We went back to the Casa Particular and decided on wearing the polka dots outfit with those amazing polka-dotted shoes (I got from DSW on clearance many moons ago and knew that these shoes would come in handy one day. And they did!) So off we went to walk the streets of Havana in this ridiculously awesome get-up (Thanks Kira Grace 😉 ). We started walking towards the malecon which is the perimeter of the island and wraps around in such a majestic and beautiful way. As we walked, we shot. We did attract attention but for some reason people felt that they couldn’t talk to us really. You saw them watching but almost felt like they were muted and couldn’t speak to us. Except of course for this one guy who came running towards us. He seemed to have some mental disorder, he was quite dirty and definitely unbathed. He was yelling at us, “Oye! Oye!” plus some gibberish. As he was walking towards us we were trying to shift and walk away but he grabbed Robert’s arm with his camera in his hand and that was completely unacceptable. We left as fast as we could although the man was following us for a bit… but no one can catch up to Super Yogis like Robert and I! haha! 🙂 To give you a visual this happened near the scene where I’m doing Natarajasana (Dancer’s Pose) in the middle of the street. We took some more shots and were on our way back to our temporary home. When we got to the main intersection where we always had to pass to get back “home” I said, “Wait! One more right here!” And I plopped myself down into a Vasisthasana (Side Plank Pose), lifted my leg up and BAM the shot was made within seconds. That was such a beautiful finale to our shoot.
We strolled back to the casa and asked the santera lady if she knew of a place we could get a good meal of Arroz blanco, frijoles negros y platanitos maduros from a local establishment, not a government-owned restaurant. She told us of a place called El Trofeo… but before we went there we were waiting for Robert’s friend Steve to show up. Since our wifi doesn’t work there we didn’t get the email that said that he was very delayed. Luckily after a little while I said, “I’m going to eat! Meet me there,” but Robert decided to join me (which was heaven-sent but I will share why in another blog.) We found the restaurant which we quickly decided would be our restaurant for every single meal after that… literally. We ate there for lunch and dinner every day! Our meals for these 4 days were white rice or moros (a mix of white rice and black beans), black beans, a side of avocado (tons of it), and plantain chips. Plus the most delicious San Francisco juice which is a special household recipe of a bunch of different juices. It was deeeeeelicioussss! The biggest surprise to us eating these same meals every single day was that we never got gas… go figure.
We returned to the casa and hung out in my room looking at the photos when a door opened and the whitest man in Cuba walked in which of course I assumed was Steve. And so a third party joined our group of photographing yoga in Cuba!
