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Getting lost while exploring
Straight after breakfast we walked into Central Havana. It is way quieter on the streets in the morning and we get hassled a lot less often. We had a guided tour around Partagas cigar factory with an English speaking guide. He explained the whole cigar making process, which was awesome cause I knew nothing about cigars. We got to see all parts of the process. While the workers are rolling etc the loud speaker reads books, plays music or gives sporting updates, which is a long carried out tradition. We weren't meant to be able to take pictures but our guide let us take a couple when the guards weren't looking. One of the young Cuban guys rolling cigars had a sign in English at his station saying "looking for a girlfriend, I promise I can love you for 20-40 years" with his phone number. At the end of the tour I was expecting a tasting or sales room but it just ended. I asked our guide where to buy cigars and he took us into the cloak room to sell us some of his stash. He and the workers get free cigars, he was selling them for 5CUC each but only had singles so we only brought a couple. He told us about the store down the road selling all varieties. So we went there to buy a couple of boxes of Romeo & Juliet cigars, which were the guides recommendation and middle of the range in terms of price. On our extended walk through Central Havana we had the least obvious conman approach us. They normally start with "happy holidays", "where are you from?", "can I help you friend?", "what are you looking for?", or a combination of these and we have learnt to just ignore and continue walking. But this guy was so casual in his approach we thought he was genuine, until the scam came out when he pulled out an asthma inhaler claiming the pharmacy charge him 25CUC for a refill and he couldn't afford it and can we please help him, he also claimed his wife was giving birth in 10mins time. At this stage we laughed out loud, walked away and carried on home. In the evening we got the ferry across to Casa Blanca to La Cabana to watch the reenactment of the firing of the cannons. The cannon goes off every night at 9pm and this was a pretty cool place to explore and was pretty chilled. Lots of mainly tourists flock across and I imagine it would be quite busy on a weekend. It is pretty ridiculous how everyone needs to film everything these days. We could barely see the reenactment because everyone had their phones, cameras and GoPros lifted up. One guy was even filming it on two devices. Most of the footage looked ultra ******, especially a shorter guy in front of us who had the guy in front of hims head in the entire video. When we ferried back over it was too late for dinner so we skipped straight to desert (second night in a row for me). We tried another restaurant in the square with a balcony so we could people watch.
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