THE LAST THREE YEARS V

CANADA AND CUBA
It is always great fun to be with my brother Cihan and his wife Marlies. They arrived in Hamilton with a friend, Karin, who was celebrating her 60 th birthday, and wished to do something extraordinary that year. She did have her wish all right.

Karin was not a very considerate baby; she decided to be born right after Christmas! If we had gone to Cuba for her exact birthday, the cost would have been much more. We had delayed our trip to Cuba for a week and her birthday celebration started with a trip to Niagara Falls area, to gape at the mostly frozen, but really majestic scenery of the falls and  to walk in the snow covered and desolate park of Niagara-on-the-lake (I could have sworn that the temperature was -50 degrees Celsius, but that was me).  All the others were well prepared, and did not complain about the cold.

After also spending New Year’s Eve in Hamilton, Al drove the whole gang (eight of us) to the Toronto airport, to take off for Cuba. Then he returned to Martinique the next day. Lucky him!

Cuba was a disaster. Almost throughout the week, the temperature was between 15 and maybe 17 degrees C (in the sun with no wind), and at night about 10. The buildings were designed to keep the guests  cool, not warm. The long open corridors to the room were the worst, the winds really blew hard at the fourth storey. The bedding did not include any cover other than a thin sheet, so even in bed one could not feel warm. We were lucky to have come from Canada, we had at least our jackets, shawls and socks etc. We talked to a couple from Argentina, who had nothing substantial to wear (coming from their summer), walking about covered in bath towels.

Some of our party got sick (Devrim and Jen, my brother), but not me, thankfully. The last two days, we were able to swim a bit; water being warm, and sun kind of relaxing when sheltered from the wind. However, I was a bit alarmed by the remnants of the sea creature called Spanish men of war (a dangerous jelly fish),  covering the whole beach, not leaving much space to step around. I had never heard of them roaming the Atlantic, but they are mostly seen in Australia. When dead, they looked like blue balloons, separated from the tail, which resembled a long piece of seaweed. If we had been in water when the invasion occurred, there would have been casualties, much worse than a sore throat. Maybe the cold weather had been a blessing.

On the other hand, we missed the extremely cold weather in Canada that week; somebody had posted in Facebook that Montreal was colder than North Pole on one of those days. The people who had come to Cuba a week before us, had to return to the extreme cold in Canada. Small mercies!

Thinking about it now is amusing, but at the time we were quite frustrated. Coming back to Martinique after the whole ordeal was magical!