Museums and No Museums

Upon awaking, breakfasting, dressing, and generally arranging ourselves, we decided to head to the Museum of the Cuidad and its tower.

                                        

The universal breakfast in Cuba is a plate of fresh fruit, a plate of cheese and ham, bread, coffee, steamed milk, eggs, and a fruit smoothie of some kind.  So delicious, so filling, and so healthy!

The Museo de Cuidad was in a converted church off the main plaza.  We could see where it was from all the tourists on its rooftop enjoying the view.

Inside the Museo, it was a description of the history of the region complete with the slavery history as well.  The city became quite prosperous because of the sugar cane that was turned into sugar just to the northeast.  Most of the beautiful colonial buildings that are still standing date from this era.

Let me describe the process you had to deal with in order to get to the roof top.  There was a woman at the base of the staircase that blocked off the staircase with a bit of twine.  She would dutifully count off 8 people and let them up.  Fair enough.  Getting up 2 flights, you then need to exit the stair case into a small anteroom and continue up 2 circular staircases to the roof.  The 2 were connected by a narrow walkway above the anteroom.

The anteroom was also a souvenir shop and had very little floor space to absorb up excess tourists. That said, going up, not a problem.  A short wait in a line and then our group of 8 counted off.  Up we go.  

Getting down, well, that was a whole different kind of story.  There was no one upstairs who could communicate with the woman at the bottom of the staircase to tell her not to send up anymore people. There were way more than 2 or 3 groups of 8 up there when we tried to leave.  The circular staircase was very steep, had some wooden-handrail-kind-of-thing, but only one person could ascend or descend at a time.  

I finally got down to the anteroom, but a large group of German tourists had just come up.  They were determined to get up to the roof, by hook or by crook.  They refused to believe that there was no room in the staircase to go side by side in opposite directions, nor would they look up to see that the walkway between the 2 circular staircases was full and impassable.  This one hulking man, stood in such a way to prevent people from exiting the circular staircase, which prevented him from going up. He was very agitated and annoyed that he couldn't ascend immediately.  It never seemed to occur to him that if he just stood aside, people could get out of the way and he could get up.

Bill's Disney bells were ringing off the hook.  He posited that all it would take was a pair of walkie-talkies to halt people coming up until the descending group had gone down.  Not too big a hassle. This was not even high, high season....can't imagine what happens then!

Rant aside, the view from the top was really quite lovely.  I tried to find our casa, which should not have been that hard, but it was blocked by some taller building.

 

That was the Museo part, now for the not part.  Of all the museums in Trinidad, Bill really wanted to see the Museo Bandido.  We arrived about 2:30, only to be told that it was closed for the rest of the day.  Such a sad face on Bill.  I decided that I needed food and didn't want to go to Pepe's coffee which was across the street.  Right on the plaza was a pizza place.  

Surprise, surprise, the pizza, while different, was quite good.  The only miss was the sauce.  If they had a good recipe for tomato sauce, it would have been really good.

We wandered all around the northern edge of town as it rises up toward the radio tower, and then went down the eastern edge before heading to Redaccion for dinner again.  Again, the meal was superb.