In which we go for a swim, listen to a big band concert and I get my hair cut for $1 – all before breakfast.

Early morning on the road to Punta Gorda

Cuba is hot at the moment – 35, 36, 37 degrees and quite humid, which somehow makes it feel hotter. Quite a few holiday makers I've talked to recently aren't particularly enjoying their holidays; I suspect they are trying to do too much in the sort of temperatures where doing nothing in the shade is the best option. You see tourist groups standing in the sun in the square listening to a guide - and it doesn't look fun.

Punta Gorda, Cienfuegos

Early morning is the best time. So today we headed out down to Punta Gorda as soon as the diesel buses and the horse hoofs woke us up – about 6.30am (we get a lie-in on a Sunday). Punta Gorda is the nearest thing to a beach in Cienfuegos – a narrow peninsular jutting out a couple of kilometres from the bottom of the main street, with a couple of small areas of litter-strewn sand. It's where the sugar cane barons built their houses in the 19th century boom times, and there are some fine buildings, including the Cuba-meets-casbah Palacio de Valle and the once-exclusive Club Cienfuegos, which now offers its swimming pool for anyone with 3CUC (the equivalent of 3US$).

Palacio de Valle

Sunday afternoon at Club Cienfuegos - happily no longer so exclusive (ie they even accepted us!)

There is also a pretty house which appears to be made from wooden weatherboards, nostalgic for a New Zealander, until you realise the weatherboards are made from concrete.

At the very tip of Punta Gorda is the Parque Recreativo, a small grassy area with benches, a gazebo looking out to sea, and steps you can swim from. There are tables, a churro stall, a cafe selling hamburgers and a small cocktail/beer bar, where last week I had my beloved Star Wars Havaianas jandals/flip flops stolen while I was drinking mojitos – an unexpected robbery in a country which feels pretty safe, certainly safe enough to take one's laptop down to the central square at night. But I digress.

At weekends, Punta Gorda park teems with Cienfuegueros drinking beer, eating pulled pork sandwiches and spreading their rubbish over the area, including chucking empty beer and rum bottles into the sea. There is music playing from huge communal speakers, but some groups bring their own sounds too, so it's a cheerful cacophony of Cuban hits old and new.

But first thing on a Sunday morning we have the place to ourselves, apart from a lone snorkeler and a grandfather reading his book while his four grandkids go for a swim. It's very pretty and peaceful.

On the way back along the sea wall, we look down among the cans and plastic bags and see the rocky shallows team with small fish, many of them in tropical hues. There are ones with stripes, others with bright blue ridges on their backs. The most colourful have a yellow and black fake “eye” towards the tail, which gives the impression they are swimming backwards.

Back in town and a big band is in full swing in the Prado, the 4km-long Parisian-inspired main street, which has a wide strip of park in the middle, complete with trees and benches. There are probably 40 instrumentalists – woodwind, brass and percussion - and they make a fine sound. The trumpet players are particularly good. Buena Vista Social Club eat your heart out. There are plenty of people out to listen - the lucky few get seats on benches in the shade, the others perch on the far side of the road, shaded by the covered walkways. It's only 9.30am, but it's already too hot to be in the sun.

I've been needing a haircut for a while – it being almost two months since we left New Zealand. But I've been nervous to venture into a Cuban salon, worried in a vain fashion about what I might end up looking like. I have had some bad experiences in the past when poor language skills meet hairdressers' scissors.

But watching the concert I spot a woman on a bench in front of me with a very smart Judi Dench trim – just what I want. Summoning up my best Spanish, I compliment her on her coiffure and venture to ask where she gets her hair cut. Isabel turns out to be 71, and very stylish in her dress sense, which is not that easy in shopping-deficient Cuba, where the flaunt-your-luxuriant-curves-in tight-fitting-lycra is the main local fashion.

Once the concert is over, Isabel takes me in hand, accompanying me to “her” salon, a large state-run establishment promising total hair and beauty treatments - although there appears to be just one hairdresser on this Sunday morning. With my hair salty from my swim, no make-up and my post-early morning swim clothes still slightly damp, I shamefacedly take my place in the queue, and Isabel stays with me to organise my cut. I don't quite look like Judi Dench – perhaps she has a bit more curl in her hair - but I am happy with the outcome. And the asking price is 5 local pesos – about 20 US cents. I give a tourist peso (1$US) so we are all quite content.

An perfectly acceptable haircut and a couple of very cute kids!

Teaching the Brits how to queue properly

(NOTE RE PHOTOS in this blog: I don’t have a lot of queuing photos. Actually I don’t have any at all. So the ones on this page are a random selection of some of Geoff’s fabulous photos that haven’t fitted into any other blogs so far.)

In my vile imperialist fashion, I used to believe an assumed wisdom that Britain was the supreme country when it came to queuing. In England there seems some sort of idea we probably invented the queue, and then passed it onto the civilised world.

Who knows? Actually, when you look into it, it doesn’t seem clear which race formed the first orderly queue - maybe only the English care enough to write about queuing. However I do know that whoever did it first, it has been refined into a far superior art form by the Cubans.

Of course, Cubans get a lot of practice. The first thing you do when you arrive in the country is join an endless queue to change money. You queue for the bank, to buy internet cards, and for the supermarket. Actually, you queue three times for the supermarket – once to get in through the front door, once for checkout, and lastly to have your purchases checked against your till receipt when you leave. If you are really unlucky you also queue to leave your other bags in the bag storage place outside the store (you can’t take bags in) and to retrieve them afterwards. You queue for buses and endlessly for any form of official business – of which I suspect there is a fair amount for your average Cuban. And much of the queuing is done outside in the street, waiting until the person on the door decides it is quiet enough inside to let a few more people in. Perhaps that stops any rioting in store.

But it’s hot in Cuba. Queuing outside in the sunshine would I suspect kill large swathes of the Cuban population each year - if they hadn’t devised their exemplary system. When you arrive at a bus stop, for example, the first thing you ask is who is the last person in the queue. That person might well not be at the back of the physical line, but could be sitting on a wall in the shade across the street. Or on a bench under a tree. Or chatting to their mate. Once you know who “el ultimo” is, you don’t have to stand in the queue, you can go and sit somewhere in the shade as well, and the next person to come along will find out that you are the “ultimo” and form a virtual queue behind you. It is extremely civilised. Once the bus comes along, the queue reforms, and everyone gets on in their allotted order.

Obviously, it requires you not to forget who you are behind, or that person to not remember an urgent appointment and go off somewhere else. I was a bit worried that the man in the yellow hat, who was the person in front of me in a long virtual queue at a police office when we went to renew our Cuban visas, might take his hat off and I wouldn’t recognise him.

The other noticeable thing about the Cuban queuing system is the good natured tone of the whole thing. No one seems to get grumpy or impatient. In a shop, once you get to the front of the queue, you are free to look at every tea towel in the box, change your mind six times about which chocolate bar to get, or (if you are a hopeless tourist) fumble about in a confused fashion with the various coins and notes for the two local currencies, trying to find the right change. No one tut tuts. It’s your turn, and you can make the most of it.

Us British (and our colonial offshoots) have a lot to learn.

Waiting for the bread man from a balcony in Havana

Early morning fishing from the Malecón in Cienfuegos

Shopping for dinner. It took quite a while for this guy to set off, as the head was so heavy he couldn't get his balance. Eventually the shopkeeper had to give him a push to get him on his way.

The harbour in Havana

Being a good housewife

In general, we’re discovering that shopping à la Cubana is a bit hit and miss for the sort of menu planning we are used to. I suspect your average Cuban wife (I don’t think husbands cook here) cooks what she can get hold of on a particular day, rather than buying what she needs for a chosen recipe. "Supermarkets" have only a few random items in them and food shopping is a time-consuming business which seems to involve a lot of peering into a wide variety of different shops and markets to see what each might have. One day there might be cheese in that otherwise empty fridge at the back – so you grab some of that. Or chicken drumsticks have just come in in that freezer over there, so you join the queue. Or there might be sausages. Or jam, or whatever. We made the mistake early on of not buying a block of cheese when we saw it. By the time we came back, cheese was gone, and we didn’t see it again for days.

A different sort of supermarket...

For that reason I suspect Cubans stock up – if they have the money. There hasn’t been any butter in Cienfuegos for two months, apparently, but our landlady Carmen still have a bit in the fridge. Getting the basics seems very hard work to anyone used to a supermarket with 42 different types of cereal. That may be why so many Cuban women don’t seem to work – shopping is a keeps you busy all morning, and the markets all close up at lunchtime.

In the market

Still the situation these days is a considerable improvement on conditions for Cubans just a few years ago. During the super-austere “Special period” of the 1990s – when Soviet support and subsidies disappeared almost overnight (the USSR had its own problems at home!), rationing and acute shortages took most food items from Cuban shelves. I may have mentioned before, but I’ll repeat it because it’s an impressive statistic: according to the Lonely Planet guidebook, during the period 1991-94, the average Cuban, who had been relatively well-off a year or so earlier, lost a third of their body weight, and ate practically no meat at all. Things didn’t really pick up until the 2000s.

A nice outing to the shops - Carmen shows us where to buy food in Cienfuegos

Some staples seem to be readily available. Bread (always white) is everywhere, and there is a large warehouse in the centre dedicated largely to selling eggs, which you buy individually for 1 peso (about 5 US cents) each, and carry home carefully! Rice, beans and flour are sold from similar warehouse-like places in huge sacks. You hand over your bag or container and they fill it up. When you get it home you pick it over very carefully, removing sticks, stones and other items surplus-to-requirements.

I promise, this all came out of the pound of beans we bought

When we first started cooking for ourselves I didn’t know whether you could get herbs and spices, but then I spotted a queue in front of a kiosk on the main street where you could buy a variety of spices, weighed out for you and handed over in a twist of plastic bag. I purchased black pepper, oregano and an orange spice I think might be saffron. Of course I ended up buying far too much because a) Cuba still uses pounds, not kilos (surely the revolution could have sorted that?) And b) I had no idea what quantity to ask for – I’ve never looked carefully at the weight of those little packets in the supermarket. However, with my new super Cuban housewife skills I can now tell you there’s a hell of a lot of oregano in half a pound! I have some extra in the kitchen if you are short. 

A fine selection in the hardware store

Top shopping tip for self-catering in Cuba: NEVER FORGET to take empty plastic bags or containers with you when you go out anywhere, in case you come across some delicacy on your travels. You do not want to miss out.

Doing the shopping

The other day Sam asked me about milkmen. In the Louis Sachar book he was reading (The Cardturner), the main character had never heard of a milkman. And I suppose that wouldn’t be uncommon these days. For most of us, the era when low value items (rather than whole take-away meals) come round the streets to your door, has long gone.

Not in Cienfuegos.

Actually, even here there are no milkmen. (Milk seems to come only in powdered form – or in sealed plastic bags only available with a ration card for people with babies.) But each afternoon the bread seller comes round on his bicycle, with fresh rolls in a tray over the front wheel.

Carmen, our house mother, buys rolls from the panadero outside our newhouse

He blows a whistle to let you know he’s coming. Often there’s a second seller who arrives with flat loaves, who yells “pan” as he approaches. Then there’s the vege man – tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and yukka are the main staples at the moment. And there’s a guy who wanders the streets with garlic and shallots carried in long strings around his neck. Down towards the square there are carts with fruit – mangoes are everywhere (3 for the equivalent of about 50 US cents), plus guava, bananas and pineapple. We saw our first avocados yesterday, so hopefully they are coming into season.

And the other day we bought some fish from a guy we passed on the street carrying a paint pail-full of unknown fillets. It was delicious.

I haven’t been brave enough yet to buy meat from one of the sellers who will cut you off a lump from a carcass on an unrefrigerated slab in a crumbling, open-fronted shop. It is still a leap too far for me from supermarket pre-packaged.