Mission: Wee-Fee

When we departed Cienfuegos, little did we suspect that it would be our last reliable ( I used that term loosely) internet connection. As I had previously mentioned in my Havana blog, the overpriced sim cards we purchased were pretty much useless (mine worked better than Jeff's, and only in Havana and Vinales; Jeff's didn't download anything despite having a 3G connection). There isn't a meaningful data network in Cuba, and the best way to connect is to purchase CUC 1.50 cards that each buy you one hour of wifi (pronounced "wee-fee" in Cuba) at a hotspot.

After the walking tour, we had some free time. Jeff and I headed to one of the two wifi hotspots in town - the one at Parque Central - to try and get online with our wifi cards. Jeff got online but I didn’t. There were quite a few wifi zombies at the hotspot, so I guess the hotspot was overloaded. The other wi-fi hotspot was at Plaza Mayor. Interestingly, neither Jeff nor I noticed that our access to news sites was curtailed whenever we got onto the wifi networks. But then, we weren't searching for articles on Cuba.

After that frustrating experience, we headed out to dinner at a very good restaurant called San Jose. My seafood paella was extraordinary and it more than made up for the bland and underwhelming vegetable paella I ordered the night before at Cienfuegos. After dinner, four of us went to the wifi hotspot at Plaza Mayor, but none of us could get online, probably due to the sheer volume of people at the hotspot. We then made our way down to the Parque Central hotspot and we all got online with some effort, but with varying degrees of success as three of us got kicked off the wifi several times. I gave up after a while and amused myself by strolling around the square, looking at all the wifi zombies, and watching in amusement as a male dog kept harassing a female dog into mating. We named them Harvey and Ashley, after the headline of the day (as in Weinstein and Judd... too soon?). Ashley was having none of it. She was more interested in chasing cars and she ran after every car that passed the square. Poor Harvey didn't know whether to join in the car chasing fun or keep trying to seduce her.

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