Shit Goes Down

This past weekend was great, but definitely an eye opener for me. All the bad things about life in Havan decided to rear their ugly heads. One night, we couldn´t find a bus to get home from a party and so walked over 2 hours in the middle of the night to get home. I should´ve been more prepared for this, it can happen all the time because transportation kind of sucks. The buses are all overcrowded, slow, and few and far between. There are also super'expensive taxis that only tourists can afford, and cheaper, slightlly more'sketchy taxis called maquinas. These are just private cars of people that decided to pick you up, but it totally depends on where they´re going as to whether they´ll take you. Anyway, you end up either waiting fora long time or walking a lot. Don´t get me wrong, I love walking, but at 2 in the morning in heels it´s not as pleasant. Then, saturday morning I was reading a book on this wall that borders the sea, called the malecon,. It is such a great place, people are always hanging out there, drinking, playing music, swimming, fishing...it´s beautiful. But this time, a guy was fishing in the sea near me starting masturbating in full view of me!! This weekend was also my first encounter with jineteras, not to be confused with the jineterOs mentioned before. These are young women that are basically prostitutes. The situation is a older, uglier, fatter white man who clearly is not cuban is hanging out with one or two young, beautiful, black or mixed girls, who are all over him. Believe me, I´m all about blind love, but it is a known fact that in Cuba, money is exchanged in this situation. Sunday night at this club and there were tons of jineteras. It was such a creepy thing to watch, ,nowing pretty much exactly what was going on. The worst thing that happened this weekend was I got mugged on Sunday. I was walking in central Havana by this pretty park and all of a sudden, two teenage guys came up behind me and grabbed my purse! Luckily, I managed to hold on immediately . I would´ve thought that after not getting my purse at once, they´d leave, but they put up a really long fight, probably about at minute of tug'of'war. Unfortunately, they weren´t close enough for me to kick them in the balls. In the end, I managed to yank it away from them and they ran off. The good ting about muggings here is they are super'frequent, especially compared to other Latin American countries, and they aren´t very dangerous because no one has weapons more dangerous than fists or feet. Afterwards as I was walking away the people I passed said things like ¨tan fuerte!¨, which means ¨so strong¨. It really shook me up, but more inan exciting, adrenaline kind of way. Anyway, thus ended my crazy weekend.