5th January

Maestra Vida.

Today was fairly uneventful, at least during the day time. We have so much stuff to catch up on that we spent about 12 hours on the internet, sometimes even using a computer each when one of the hostel ones was free in order to speed the process up. We managed to upload the Cuba blogs and make a dent in our to do list before we turned our attention to the question of what to do that evening. After a quick discussion with the guy behind the desk we decided we would give a place called club 4-40 a try as he reckoned a taxi back from Klub Mongosta place would be about $20!! We then cooked dinner and got ourselves ready for the night out. After checking with a taxi driver outside the hostel who said that a taxi back from Klub Mongosta would actually only be about $6-8 we started on our way. Very irritatingly it turned out that the address I had got of the clubs website contradicted itself and we spent about 2 hours walking up the street and then back down the other direction before we eventually found it, it was closed!!! Rather annoyed by this we walked to get a drink and decided we would go across the road to Maestra Vida instead despite the rather pricey $6 entrance fee! We walked in to a smallish club split into 3 parts the central part had a dance floor in front of a very high stage where they were setting up for the live band, on the right was an area full of tables which we shunned in favour of the left section which had longer narrow dance floor as well as tables on two floors where we could sit and leave our stuff. More importantly than all this however were the people many of who were dancing already. We lost no time and after Mae had put her dance shoes on, got up for a few dances and it wasn't long before we were dancing away with various people... Although the style was almost exclusively Cuban we still enjoyed ourselves and it was refreshing that no one came and told us we were doing it wrong since we were dancing a different style. Oddly the music being played by the DJ was almost exclusively from Puerto Rico despite the style of the dancers. We danced for about 2 hours before the band came on. The band were probably quite good but unfortunately they were Cuban and didn't play anything we haven't heard 1000 time in the last 2 months so we found them rather uninspiring added to this was the sudden tripling of the number of people in the club and although the better dancers tried to dance smaller it progressively became very difficult. We did manage however to have a few more good dances during the less popular songs when there was a little more space and despite the cramped conditions from this point on we had a thoroughly enjoyable night. The band stopped about 2:30 and we left around an hour after that with people still paying to come in so we have no idea what time the place closes. The walk home was uneventful and we arrived back to collapse into bed around 4:30am.