What's That Crazy Sound?

I have a new favourite song. I don't know who does it, but I think it's called No, No, No, No, Don't Funk With My Heart. It goes, "No no no nooooo! Don't funk with my heeaaaaart!" You can basically find me singing it 24 hours a day. They play it all the time at the gym, nice and loud so we can still hear it in the yoga studio, even with the door closed.

We had the best yoga class ever tonight (not at the gym) and then I made the best hummus ever, which we ate while watching a documentary about Lou Reed. He is a wild man.

Speaking of which, The Naked Ape is so far very compelling.

- Andrew

Time Flies

I can't believe this weekend's over already. It really flew by. Yesterday was the Kermesse, which we go to every year. It's a big giant rummage sale to raise money for the IWK Hospital, and everything they're selling has been donated, so the prices are really good. Since we're in the process of trying to get rid of stuff for our move, it was probably just as well that there were no clothes this year. We were disappointed anyway, though. I picked up about a dozen 45's, including "Walk on the Wild Side" and "Come Dancing," some books, and a Spirograph set that's exactly the same version I had as a kid. One of the books I got is a pretty controversial one called The Naked Ape, by Desmond Morris. It's a zoological study of human beings that came out in 1967. It's pretty politically incorrect by today's standards, but I think it's going to be very interesting. The guy's thesis is that the human animal "spends a great deal of time examining his higher motives and an equal amount of time studiously ignoring his fundamental ones," thus causing itself a lot of problems.

We also played some tennis with our friend Meg yesterday. We're all kind of bad at it and kept hitting balls into the courts beside us, where there were kids involved in some sort of tournament. After dinner we hung out with our other friend Krista and watched some hipster kids from Austin, TX redecorate each others' houses on TV. We also saw the much-touted Little People in a Big World or whatever it's called, which seemed all right. There wasn't a whole lot of conflict going on, though. When we were leaving her house, Krista's cat Ralph got out and there was a bit of a panic trying to coax him first out of the garbage alley and then out of the neighbour's back yard. Krista eventually caught him and he looked pretty content in her arms as she carried him back home.

Then today was the first softball game of the season. Or rather, the first two games, since we always play two in a row. Our team started out both games looking really good, but ended up losing each time. Plus, someone on the other team hit a line drive straight into my shin. Yowch! At least it was a team we like; they're a good bunch of guys. Mostly, anyway. We had probably way too many people playing. Almost everyone who could possibly show up did today. It would have been nice if some of those people had come out to the practices. Jeesh! So, every position had two people playing it, switching back and forth each inning. The batting order was a bit of a nightmare. Lots of really good players, though, including some new faces.

After grabbing some dinner and a beer at a restaurant beside the video store where we had to return a DVD of the first season of Dr. Katz, Alison and I walked home at dusk, which was quiet, golden, and magical this evening. We felt like we were noticing every detail there was to notice, and it was all connected to us. When we got to our driveway, there was a cat waiting for us whose name, according to his tag, was Charlie. He was really friendly and we had a good petting session with him before a truck pulled in and broke it up.

The "show" at the coffee shop the other night, by the way, was very low key. I don't think there were ever more than two customers in the place who weren't people who were playing. Certain Nude Friends (not Men, it turns out) were two kids making experimental noise with instruments and electronic gadgetry. It was pretty silly, but fun too. Nobody recognized the Hitchhiker's Guide theme. In fact, I was the only person to remember to bring a towel. What's wrong with the nerds these days?

- Andrew

Projects and Pains

So, I got Ian over here tonight to learn an acoustic-guitar-as-faux-banjo part to accompany my Wurlitzer electric piano version of "Journey of the Sorcerer," the Eagles song that was used as the theme to The Hitchhiker's Guide. It was a pretty painless lesson; he's a quick study. We'll perform it tomorrow night in honour of International Towel Day, opening for Certain Nude Men. I have no idea what they sound like, buy I'm intrigued by the name. I figure while I'm there I might as well whip out an acoustic version of "Robots of Me" since it sort of fits in with the loose theme.

Yoga class was a killer last night. We worked intensely on the four different warrior positions, which all demand a lot of leg and hip strength. I kept waking up all night long wondering if I was in the hospital because my legs hurt so much. Also, the cats fighting and/or making feline love in our backyard at 4:00 didn't help. If the martian sound hadn't woken us up, Buster using our bodies as springboards to look fascinatedly out the window surely would have. The upshot is that this afternoon I had a hard time keeping my eyes open while I typeset a menu. We took a nap before dinner and when the alarm went off I couldn't even figure out what existence was, let alone who or where I was. Now, of course, it's past our bedtime and neither one of us is tired.

This morning I had to decline an offer to go on tour for two weeks with Buck 65. Boooo! It would have been with Rich and one other guy who's a great musician and a hell of a guy, playing probably a few different instruments at mostly jazz festivals around North America. I'm really bummed that I can't do it, but I just took a vacation at work and things are really heating up there. Plus, it's the last two weeks of June, when Ali and I are going to be in the last throes of moving. Totally impossible, but it sure would have been a fun time. Rats.

Happy Birthday, Mom...

... even though you probably won't be able to read this until tomorrow. Have a safe trip back from Italy. Maybe they'll give you some kind of cheese and crackers with a candle in it or something on the plane.

- Andrew

But Mostly Laughing

Softball was really fun. We had batting/fielding practice and played some scrub for three and a half hours. Meg took a grounder hard in the opposite shin from the one on which she already had a bruise, and got someone out at second base. I made a spectacular double play from left field.

This morning we did the laundry over brunch and ran into Ian and Kate, the couple who are going to take our little mini-house when we move. Ian works at the coffee shop I patronize twice daily. He mentioned that they're having some kind of multi-performer show on Thursday which is a celebration of International Towel Day, a day for remembering Douglas Adams and the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and asked if I would be interested in contributing some entertainment. So I thought I might try to learn that weird Eagles tune that was used as the theme music on the television and, I believe, the radio show as well. I can probably figure out how to capture the psychedelic aspect of it, but the bizarre twist of its banjo-driven foundation may be harder to replicate.




As we were folding our clothes, an older man was talking to the woman who runs the place. He was bragging about all the movies he's been downloading, and how anyone who pays to go to or rent movies is a sucker. "Yeah, tonight I'm gonna watch the first two seasons of Lost," he was saying, "since I've never seen that, and then tomorrow night I'll sit down to The DaVinci Code. I'm downloading Poseidon while I do my laundry. Yeah, I just burn them directly onto DVD and sit in my own living room with some popcorn and a beer." While he went on to list about fifteen other movies he was going to be watching, I couldn't help wishing we had citizen's arrest in this country. Though, to be honest, I'm not sure whether I was more irritated by his immorality or his boorishness. In any case, we got our laundry folded with record speed (not even spending any time to savour the sock-balling) and ran out of there groaning and laughing.

- Andrew

Just the Facts

OK, I get it, you like the pictures and the anecdotes, but not the philosophical ruminations. That's fine, but unfortunately I don't have much to relate about what's been going on outside my head this week, as it's mostly been work, work, work, and plenty of it. We're trying to win a new huge account at the agency, and keep up with the work from the old ones while the folks in charge fly around to various meetings and two of the designers take their vacations. Highly hectic and disorganized.

We didn't end up watching the fifth Marx Brothers movie, Duck Soup, as we've seen it many times and just weren't in the mood after revealing the funniest scene on the blog. I guess it just seemed like "one snoop-a too much," so we took the box set back and got something else instead. That's a common occurrence these days that, when you think about it, ... Oh no, I'm not going down that unpopular alley. Nice try, but you're not gonna get me that easily.

Maybe I should tell you about what's been going on with Ali instead. She's been taking some pictures of the semi-spring around town and planning out a photo shoot which she'll be doing herself for the government. She recently had a tooth pulled by the crappy student dentists that she goes to, even though we have dental coverage through my work. Last year they did a full root canal to save that same tooth, but I guess it didn't work because one morning over brunch it started just crumbling apart. So now there's a big space at the back of Ali's jaw. That's not necessarily a problem, but the dentistry students said the upper tooth in that spot might start growing down to fill the space. They can put in a porcelain implant, but it costs $3,000 and is considered cosmetic, i.e. not covered by my insurance. There is a much cheaper option, but it involves a Chiclet and a rubber band. So it looks like extra long molar is the way we're going to go.

One thing Alison and I did together, just yesterday, was play some tennis with our friend Meg. The weather here has been on and off springlike so we have to take advantage of it when we can. But things are starting to look pretty green and there are tweeting birds and all that sort of thing. The tennis was lots of fun, even though we all stunk at it. I took on the two goils. There were a lot of balls hit into other people's courts and it was kind of exhausting, plus I got a huge blister on my right foot. It was worth it though. We'll go again and maybe get Johanna involved once she gets some sneakers, or "runners," as they say in Ontario.

And speaking of tennis, it's one of the motifs in this fantastic movie we watched over at Krista's last night with speaking-of-Johanna. It's called The Squid and the Whale. You've probably heard of it; I think it got quite a bit of hype for an indie film. It's a great story about a small dysfunctional literary family in Brooklyn in the eighties, full of my favourite kind of characters — profoundly flawed. The title is a heavy-handed metaphor, but otherwise the film is subtle and naturalistic, full of humour and pathos and warmth. Like a less fantastic The Royal Tenenbaums. In fact, Wes Anderson was one of the producers. Solid acting, too. Check it out, yo.

That's it from me. I'm off to a practice of the ball that is soft now. Maybe some people will actually show up this week. The season starts next Sunday. Hooray for recreational baseball!

- Andrew

Non-linguistic Adventures

We just finished watching the fourth Marx Brothers movie, Horse Feathers, which was possibly even better than Monkey Business. I guess the quality just kind of steadily climbs over those first five movies. It's weird, because I'd always thought Animal Crackers, the second one, was my favourite. It definitely has some great moments, like the whole "Hooray for Captain Spaulding/Hello, I Must Be Going" number, but it also drags pretty heavily in parts. Anyway, this one we just saw takes place at a college where Groucho is the new president and tries to improve the football team by hiring a couple of ringers, but ends up with Chico and Harpo, who are of course chaotically terrible at football, by accident. Harpo really shines in this one comedically, and performs possibly his best harp solo, a rococo version of "Everyone Says I Love You". Next is Duck Soup, generally estimated to be the best of all Marx Brothers movies. I've never agreed with that before, but maybe my opinion will be changed by this back-to-back chronological viewing. It does definitely contain the funniest scene, where Harpo, dressed as Groucho, tries to fool Chico, also dressed as Groucho, into thinking that he, Chico, is looking in a mirror. An old gag, yes, but an early and spectacularly varied version of it.

At yoga last night we did a meditation where we were supposed to ask ourselves, "Who am I?" and pay attention only to our body for the answer, trying not to think in linguistic terms. I started seeing all sorts of colours before my eyes, repeating in a certain pattern. At first I thought it was pretty cool, but then I realized they were the exact colours I'd just used in a piece I'd been designing at work yesterday. It kind of bugged me because I didn't want to think that I'm just the last bit of work I did, even if it was enjoyable, but I couldn't make the colours go away.

We also did a lot of shoulder- and chest-opening poses, which Michi said might cause some unexpected emotional reactions because we can keep a lot of emotion bottled up in those places. I don't know about that, but I did have a lot of weird nightmares that kept waking me up all night. One was about there being mice everywhere. I guess that's not too surprising, though, since Buster "caught" a mouse yesterday, meaning that he played with it until it was completely exhausted and left it in a fearful ball on the kitchen floor. We put it outside under a tree and were then thinking about it out there when there was a heavy thunderstorm just before going to bed. I hope he either was all right or died quickly. Poor little guy.

- Andrew

A Culture of Outsiders

I woke up with this song in my head a couple of days ago and was really struck by what an apt analysis of addiction it is. Iggy feels like an outsider, a status of which he's both proud and ashamed. To console himself, he turns to some taboo behaviour which temporarily makes him feel better, even as it confirms his non-belonging. While he feels better he is defiantly contemptuous of the straight culture that he knows is not for him. But he knows that eventually he'll be "trying to break in" again, and again being frustrated because he is too much of a "freak". And then of course he'll be driven to the destructive behaviour again.

I think this is a scenario with which a lot of people are intimately familiar. It's a kind of infinite loop that the human brain can get stuck in, a bug in the program that has something to do with living in a culture sophisticated enough to temporarily override more basic biological impulses. And I also think that in our particular culture advertisers and less malevolent mass media have learned exactly how to take advantage of this bug to serve their own ends. It's to their advantage to have everyone feel like some kind of outsider and therefore be driven to learn all they can about the culture that doesn't accept them, while still partaking of the products and services that they feel define them as a non-conforming individual.

But the simple truth is that the culture outside of which we all supposedly lie, the "straight" life which we yearn to be a part of but which suffocates us when we approximate it, doesn't exist. Life is much too complicated and people are much too varied to be defined by one single set of cultural values. The lifestyle which Iggy defines himself in contrast to, which he falsely imagines is shared by the majority of "normal" people around him, is nothing more than an ideal, and not even one to which anyone should aspire. By buying into that ideal, or even by believing that others are successfully buying into that ideal, we make freaks of ourselves. Ironicallly, if we could all realize that everyone is some kind of freak or other, we'd all be a little more well-adjusted.

Terry Zwigoff, the director of Crumb, Ghost World, and now Art School Confidential, was on Definitely Not the Opera on CBC Radio yesterday. The show is a generally kind of annoying look at pop culture to which I sometimes catch myself listening if there's an interesting guest. This week they had this theme of "Geeks" going, and had been talking to various people about what's particularly geeky about them or what they sympathize with about geeks. The host, Sook-Yin Lee, asked Terry why he seemed to always make films about outsiders, and he replied that he didn't think he did. "I just make movies about normal people that I see in my life," he said. "I don't meet people like the guy in Mission Impossible in my life, but I meet lots of people who feel frustrated in one way or another with the way society and the world are shaping up. And I think that's a reasonable feeling; I don't think that makes you an outsider."

She pushed the point. "Well we've been talking about geeks on this show, and we've come to realize that a geek is really just someone with a lot of knowledge in a very specific area, about which they're maybe a little too obsessive." Terry actually got a little peeved at this. "I don't think so at all. I think the word 'geek' refers to someone who is generally unattractive and socially inept, and that's it. I don't think there are any positive or even neutral qualities that are part of the definition, and I certainly wouldn't want to be lumped in with anyone under that term. Sometimes the media will try to pretend temporarily that there's something hip about it, like 'This week the hottest new look is "geek chic",' and then next week it'll be green shoes or something. Frankly I find that term an irritating and nauseating cultural shorthand." I was cheering in my seat as Sook-Yin cut the interview short, and I turned the radio off just after she called the director a curmudgeon.

Art School Confidential, by the way, is really great. We went to see it last night with Joan and Jason. Like Ghost World, it's based on a Daniel Clowes comic story and cowritten by him. Also like that movie, there's plenty of hilarious Clowesian misanthropy balanced with disdain for the attitudes that allow the misanthrope to create himself.

Another great movie, which we watched tonight, is the Marx Brothers' Monkey Business. That's the one where they're stowaways on an ocean liner. It was their third film and the first one which wasn't just a screen adaptation of a stage show. We rented a box set of their first five films and have been watching them in order. The first one, The Cocoanuts, I have to say is kind of a snorefest. Really not very good. The only things that make it worthwhile are Chico's piano solo and Harpo's sour expression when he gets up from the table every time someone starts to make a long-winded speech. But Animal Crackers (best line: Groucho is trying to convince two women to marry him and one complains that that would be bigamy, to which he replies, "Sure, and it'd be big of you, and you — it'd be big of all of us! Let's be big for once. I'm tired of these conventional marriages. One husband and one wife was good enough for your grandmother, but who wants to marry your grandmother? Nobody. Not even your grandfather.") and especially Monkey Business are full of hilarious gags and charming anti-bourgeois antics. Those guys were outsiders who were able to have a lot of laughs while they made a place for themselves by poking fun at the status quo.

- Andrew

Just to Prove That It Really Existed

We got our film photos from Cuba developed, and a lot of them turned out pretty well. Here's a whole wheelbarrow-load of them.

By the way, this is the 100th post to "Our Blogloo". Centennial celebrations will commence internationally at 18:00 ADT.

These first few give you an idea of what the resort looked like:

Our room

The giant bed with one of the crazy blanket sculptures the chambermaid would make

Dining room

The lobby/front lounge area

Games area...

We always saw this cat on our way to the beach.

The Beach:

Insert "Jaws" theme here.

Getting closer...

Yikes!!

Here's a bunch taken while snorkelling — probably the most surprisingly fun thing we did.












The "train" to Guardelavaca, which passed us on one of our bike excursions.

The apartments sold to exceptional workers by the government.




The weird rocky shoreline that we visited twice, which may or may not be made of fossilized coral.

Closeup of the fossilized coral?

Not a Cocteau Twins album cover, but some of those trilobyte-like things I was telling you about, which I still don't know what they were. (Hard to see, I know.)



A few of the nicer scenic shots

Ignorance is bliss — last day on the beach, before it sank in that we were terribly burned

What We Did on Our Spring Vacation (Extended Version)

OK, I'll warn you right now, I'm putting A LOT of words and pictures on here. So if you're not in the mood for a vacation slide show you might as well go peruse this monstrosity for a few hours instead. As a reward for your patience, should you choose to stick around, here's some pleasant Cuban music to enjoy while I take you on a magical journey...




Your magical journey host, dog-tired after finally arriving at the resort

Our first day in Cuba was actually just part of one night, as we got in quite late. We'd rushed around like crazy back in Halifax, trying to get everything done before we left and becoming generally stressed out. A guy who looked exactly like Paul Shaffer, including the sunglasses, drove the minibus to the airport blasting Guns 'n Roses, the words to which I was surprised to find out Ali knew. He also kept turning the volume up and down while he drove, for some reason, as if it was one of the many knobs he had to keep checking and adjusting. In fact, he was very frantic in general and we were convinced he was on speed.

Then the ladies at the airport who were in charge of giving us our tickets told us we were late and almost didn't make it, even though there was still a full hour before the flight left. Weird. We didn't get seats together, so Ali watched the back of my head as I read my whole Believer magazine and got a good start on Infinite Jest. I put a pretty decent sized dent in that one over the course of the week, and am now maybe a twentieth of the way through it. The seats were uncomfortable and the meal was a roast beef sandwich (who eats roast beef anymore?) but otherwise the flight was pretty bearable for being four hours long.

The air when we got off the plane was unimaginably hot, moist, and oxygenated. It had an interesting smell, too, that I never did figure out what it was. Kind of like some kind of smoky spice or perfume. Of course there was no air conditioning in the little airport and the luggage carousel was excruciatingly slow, but we were entertained by the drug-sniffing dog, who was really cute. He wasn't a German shepherd or anything, and wasn't even being led around. There was a guy in charge of him, but he was just left to wander around, happily sniffing everything. I have to say, he was very thorough too, even though he didn't seem to have any kind of system, which made me think about all the energy that can get expended trying to create systems that ensure thoroughness.

The bus to the resort included a bit of a tour from a friendly Cuban woman named Madeleine, who told us about places we could see, tipping, a donkey that drinks beer, and other useful tidbits. We found almost all the people we dealt with friendly and helpful. We couldn't really see much in the darkness outside the bus, but an hour later we arrived at the resort and checked in. It seemed like a really nice place, mostly open to the outside and brightly painted with lots of plants and birds chirping everywhere, and a breeze blowing through the trees. The room itself was spare but clean, with a huge bed and a couple of beers in the minibar/fridge. Unfortunately there was also a pretty unpleasant smell like wet cardboard or a dead rat coming from the ventillation, so we turned the air conditioning off.

We were starving from not eating the roast beef sandwiches, so we went down to the inside/outside dining area, where we'd heard there was some food left over out of which one could make sandwiches, even though it was very late. A couple of cheese buns and some really tough ends of citrus fruit later, we were ready to call it, which is when Ali took the above picture of me. A slightly older (than us) couple had sat down at the table beside us and the woman seemed itchy to chat. Unfortunately, our eyes were glazing over at this point, and all we could manage in the way of conversation was a vaguely neanderthal "Huh. Huh." We crashed hard at probably around 2 or 2:30 and I dreamed about rats trying to eat our food.

The next morning we woke up to this:

The view from our balcony

It still smelled great outside and the birds were making all sorts of cute noises, plus you could hear the ocean beyond the trees. Unfortunately, it still smelled like a pulp mill in the room and plus now it was boiling hot since we'd turned off the a/c. We had breakfast at the buffet, which was pretty good except for these bullet-shaped breaded things that I was assuming were some kind of home fry or tater tot but were actually stuffed with what looked and tasted like flour and water. We later found out they were supposedly chicken, so I didn't have to eat any more of them.

We spent a lot of the second day wandering around, checking the place out and getting the lay of the land.

The resort, seen from a third-story walkway

The pool, seen from behind the bushes because this is where most of the yahoos hung out

Ali taking some pictures which we haven't gotten developed yet

Ali taking some more pictures that aren't developed, on the beach

Being sufficiently impressed with the layout and free everything including incredible cappuccinos, we went to the beach in the afternoon for a swim and some tanning. The beach was just a short sidewalk from the main resort, and actually had some resort-related small buildings right on it. We were sensibly cautious with the tanning lotion, having heard plenty of horror stories about three-minute sunburns. But we didn't end up being on the beach long anyway, because hunger soon struck and we had to check out the snack bar which becomes the disco after 11:00 pm. Having nothing but leisure time is strangely tricky to schedule. It definitely took us a few days to get the hang of it. The food at the snack bar, unlike almost all the food we had at the resort, was not very good. I had a plate of grilled seafood, which turned out to be covered in this tomato sauce that tasted sort of like a wet rag. The shrimps all had the shells still on them, and even their heads. Eyeballs too. There were legs and feelers everywhere. We couldn't figure out a good way to get that crap off them without making a huge mess. It wasn't so bad for me because I only had three shrimps on my combo plate. Ali fared a little worse, having ordered the grilled shrimp.

Later on, we ran into the woman at whom we'd grunted the night before, whose name was Jane, we learned. She turned out to be in the room next to ours with her husband, Bill. Their room also turned out to have had a bad smell. I asked her if it was like wet cardboard and she replied that it was more like a dead rat. But she said she complained to someone about it and now it seemed all right. Miraculously, ours was fine after that too. I don't even want to know how they fixed the problem.

Dinner was again at the same buffet, where we ate almost all our meals. It's called "La Arcada," which, according to Ali's Spanish/English dictionary has a double meaning of arcade and also retching.

That night we checked out the crazy old piano player I already told you about. He smokes a big cigar while he plays, and has a list of 104 songs that he knows. They are all rendered in this maniacal style where every bar has to have some new and surprising trick thrown in. It's entertaining, but really you start to wonder after awhile if there's any shred of sanity in his musical head. We also saw the tres guitar quintet I also told you about. They sounded kind of like the music you may or may not still be listening to. We watched them with Jane and Bill, but left when they were replaced onstage by a loud obnoxious emcee announcing loud obnoxious high-school-style skits.

Next morning we took some bikes out and explored the area a little. It's very rural and very poor. The houses all look like falling apart shacks, but I guess they are nicer on the inside than on the outside. Most of the people we passed smiled and waved, which made me feel a little less like an obnoxious North American thinking he's at the zoo or something.

Ali's favourite shack

We ended up getting kind of lost, and there were vultures flying around everywhere. Especially around the train tracks where a dog was eating some unidentifiable carcass. We later noticed that these vultures were always around wherever you went, but at the time it seemed kind of ominous.




A road that we turned down, hoping to find a way back to the resort, ended up leading down a hill to a "marina," at which point it stopped. We had just passed a lot of trucks at the side of the road whose drivers had all looked curiously at us as we pretended to know where we were going, and we now had to immediately turn around and ride past them again, looking like we didn't care that it was now as obvious to us as it had already been to them that we didn't know where we were going. At the top of the hill, an older guy with a flattened nose stopped us and asked us in Spanish if we had any food or clothes we could give him. I handed him a convertible peso, which he took as inconspicuously as he could. I guess begging is illegal.

Back at the resort, we grabbed some lunch and headed to the beach for a swim to cool off. Masks and snorkels were available, so we tried that out only a little fearfully. What we'd thought was a big rock in the still pretty shallow water turned out to be a large school of human-hand-sized tropical fish. They were mostly these flat roundish grey ones and cute yellow-and-black-striped ones. It was kind of creepy seeing all that life going on right around us, but also pretty cool. They're very good at not letting you touch them, even when they're all around you. I wish I had some photos to put on here, because we took a few rolls over the week with this underwater camera Alison borrowed from work, but those pictures are not developed yet either. Just watch Finding Nemo and you'll get the picture.

That night, the big show had been recommended to us by the staff every time we brought up how great the band the night before had been. They all said, "Yeah, those guys are good, but tonight we'll have the full band." But the full band turned out to be a guy playing electric guitar through either a chorus pedal or some kind of hair metal distortion, alternately, a keyboardist with a full arsenal of equally horrific sounds, and an "American Idol"-type guy singing numbers like "What's Goin' On?" (the 4 Non Blondes song, not the Marvin Gaye one) and "O-Bla-Di, O-Bla-Da".

The next day was mostly taken up with tennis, ping pong, and more snorkelling/lolling around on the beach. We did go for a couple of walks. One was to the next resort down the beach, which was "four stars plus" to see whether they had any sunglasses at their gift shop. I had stupidly forgotten to bring mine. It seems like when I forget to pack something, it's usually the most important thing. I once went somewhere for two weeks with no socks or underwear. Anyway, sunglasses were inexplicably impossible to come by the entire time we were in Cuba. The other resort turned out to be much like ours, but with everything bumped up to the next level. The people staying there looked a little fancier too — fewer student-yahoos and more suburban success stories. Interesting that the class divide is not just between the tourists and the Cubans, but also intratouristical.

The other walk was along a trail that led off the beach, along the shore behind the trees that were between our balcony and the ocean. It was paved for quite awhile, and then turned into just a cut path through the forest. We were in sandals and so thought we might have to turn back, but the path was covered in naturally formed rock. It was really weird-looking — like concrete Swiss cheese. Sometimes you'd come across a pretty big hole and there would actually be a tree growing out of it, which gave the impression of a city sidewalk. I thought at first that it was volcanic in nature, but we figured out later that it was all fossilized coral that had been smoothed out somewhat by the water. You could tell because sometimes it would be broken open to reveal these mazelike patterns.

The five-piece band we'd liked so much two nights before played that night in the dining area, because it was "Noche Cubana". That meant that all the food they served was traditional Cuban fare, and the servers all wore traditional Cuban costumes. We enjoyed the band over one too many glasses of red wine while we ate. It felt like a special night.

The band and some guy eating his dinner

I went for a bike ride by myself early the next morning, as the sun coming up had woken me and it looked like there'd be some nice light for photos.

A bus brings some early arrivals from the airport

A field off the road protected by a cactus fence

The beach before the sun-worshippers invade it

At 9:00 we went on a bicycle tour with five other people, two of whom were Jane and Bill. Jane hadn't been on a bike in awhile and fell over onto the pavement before she even started moving. It looked really painful, but she said she was all right. In fact, when I asked her a couple of days later about it, she said she'd escaped unscathed. I said I was sure she would have gotten a bad bruise, and she said she might have one on her bum but hadn't checked yet, which I thought was a little weird.

A guy who looked like Chris Murphy with long curly black hair and a Spanish accent led us down the highway about two miles to a tiny subdivision of apartment buildings. He explained a lot about Cuban life along the way, and showed us the market where the local people spend their government pesos. These are the non-convertible ones that are worth about one twentieth of the convertible ones. This market is in fact the only place where they are worth anything, and you use them to buy your month's allotment of staples like rice and beans, provided by the government. All other transactions are in convertible pesos, which go for $1.30 CDN. Our guide, Anger (pronounced ahn-ZHER) makes 25 pesos a month working at the resort. He said that people who work at such places are considered lucky because they make more than a lot of people and get fed and make tips. His mother is a school teacher and only makes 15 pesos a month. The village of kind of gross-looking apartments, he told us, is for people who are exceptional at their jobs and have been doing them for a long time. As a reward for this, the government allows you the privilege of buying one of these apartments, but you are never allowed to sell it. So you are, in effect, forced to live there for the rest of your life.

The bike tour

The rest of that day was more wandering, ping pong, and snorkelling. We ate dinner that night in one of the "a la carte" restaurants, the Cuban one. The food was really good, but we found it kind of weird that this restaurant which was pretending to be fancier than it actually was was decorated to look like a gentrified version of the impoverished houses we'd seen lots of on our bike trip — the kind most of the people working in the restaurant probably worked in. After dinner we felt kind of romantic from the wine and being dressed up, so we went for a night-time stroll on the beach. On returning, we were stopped by a beach security guard so that he might give Alison a present of this leaf-origami grasshopper he'd made.



It was intricate and beautiful, and we thanked him very much and he smiled widely. Ali asked me if I thought he'd expected us to give him something and I said probably and she started to cry, which made me feel like kind of a jerk but which I also found really nice after all the thinking and talking we'd done all day about injustice and given the fact that it was so delicate and sweetly given and that we probably would have to leave it behind when we returned to Canada. I said he probably was just bored, thought he'd make something clever he knew how to make, and gave it to someone at random as an act of kindness, and if he happened to make some money out of it that would just be icing on the cake. That made Ali feel better.

The rest of our time there was pretty much more of the same. We did go for a disappointing trip to Guardalavaca one day, where we'd thought we'd do some sightseeing. It turned out not to be a town, but just another resort with a market outside it where people were selling the same crap they sold at our slightly better resort. We also went for another long bike ride on which we again weren't sure where we were going. But this time we ended up at the other end of the path behind the trees we'd walked along before. A ping pong match with Jane and Bill was threatened all week long but never materialized. An old Italian guy on the beach with an iPod wouldn't stop singing at the top of his voice. We caught two lizards "doing it".

The perpetrators — kind of hard to see, I admit

On our last day there, we flushed all our previous cautiousness down the toilet by lying out in the sun for a couple of hours without any sunscreen on. Stupid, I know. We thought that since we were pretty tanned already it wouldn't hurt us. I got the worse dosage and am still regretting it today. My entire front got a bad burn, and my shoulders even blistered. I'm peeling like crazy now, and I have to wear long sleeves everywhere because my arms look like a rotting corpse. The one positive aspect of that episode was that the cold Halifax air was kind of refreshing when we got off the plane.

Now we've been back for a week, the old routine is in full gear again, and we're getting ready to move into our new place over the month of June. I can't really say I like moving, but getting rid of a large percentage of our crap is fairly exciting. Tomorrow we ruthlessly go through the books and magazines. If anyone actually made it this far, sorry to be such a bore. Thanks for listening.

- Andrew