Old Cars, La California Restaurant, Rooms to Rent

It was near twilight when five restored American cars came to pick us up and drive us to the restaurant. We chose to ride in the 1959 Impala driven by a woman. She has visited the US with the Women Entrepreneurs of the Americas.

 
She and her husband co-own a business. He repairs old cars and she manages the Taxi business. 

They own 6 cars. He has restored each of them. She works with travel agents and individuals to book their cars, and 18 others that she manages. She does the driving. John Kerry had his photo taken in the car we drove in when he came to open the Embassy. 

On the way to the restaurant, we stopped at the Big Jesus Statue built by Batista's wife in 1958. The view of the city was lovely at night.

 Milena said "regular" people live in the neighborhood where the restaurant is located. The streets were alleyways, narrow with no street lights. An "agricultural store" held the corner of the road. Men were offloading boxes of carrots, onions, and potatoes into the store. 

The buildings were two or three stories high with apartments on ground level  and up. Each doorway or balcony seemed to open directly into a room with one or two chairs and a TV and no other lights. Most people were hanging around on the hot street. The temperature was in the 80s even after dark and the humidity high. 

The building across from the restaurant had a sign reading Rooms for Rent, by the Hour or the Day. 

We had a great meal in the quaintly decorated La California restaurant -- Rum and Coke, pumpkin soup, bread, lobster, ropa vieja, wine, dessert cake with guava jam. 

After dinner, our driver, Otniel, took us to the fortifications for the evening ceremony. We joined hoards of locals and tourists, walked through a fort many times larger than the one in St Augustine, avoided buying anything from the vendors lining the way and hawking their goods. In the end, it was one Big Bang of a canon that we'd all came to peril experience. 

The canon has been shot every night for a century or so to mark the closing of the bay for the night so pirates couldn't get in, and the closing of the fortification gates, so people better get inside if they didn't want to spend the night out in the scary world. 

Back to the bus and our thin mattresses :)