My hamburger adventure which lead to an invitation to Cuba

---

I headed to the National History museum and found it was closed due to refurbishment, so I began climbing the famous hill Cerro Cristobal where the Japanese gardens and botanical gardens were located. To get there I needed to walk through a leafy residential area in the direction of the mountains and climb up a mountain in the afternoon sun. It was getting late and I didn’t get there so I decided to head back down. On the way up many cyclists were passing by and I decided that next time I would hire a bike and bring a helmet with me to cover more ground faster.

I was tired but at the same time I couldn’t imagine a more beautiful way to pass the time in such a beautiful part of the world, walking under palm trees, looking up at the view of the mountains in the distant blue sky and now and then I would stop to drink water, sit o a bench under a shady tree and write any ideas down as they occurred to me in my journal. I later sat down in a tea shop for a refreshing cup of Green jasmine, I began pondering how this trip had changed me over the last 3 weeks and what with the perspective gained by both being alone and being so far away from my own culture I had learned about my life back in England, and what changes I would make when I got back.

On my way back to my hostel I went looking for a hamburger and found one in a café which had pictures and objects all over the wall relating to Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, the Godfather, Clockwork Orange, Scarface, Pulp Fiction, the Simpsons, the Beatles, Bob Marley, the Police, Michael Jackson and Grease. A man at the bar, also waiting for a hamburger started joking with the waitress about the pictures on the wall, and asked if all the stars in the pictures had died. She pointed to a picture of Danny and Sandra Dee from Grease on the wall and said that all had died apart from John Travolta. Well John Travolta sparked off the conversation between me and the Cuban guy who was sitting next to me waiting hungrily for a hamburger.

He was from the second largest city in Cuba and he’d stayed for two years in Chile after coming for a holiday and enjoying it so much he never returned home. I told him what I’d heard about Havana, that the cars were noisy. He laughed and said that in fact they weren’t noisy, they were vintage, from 1950s and 60s in America. He asked me why I hadn’t been to Cuba as lots of English people love holidaying there and I remembered that it had been a place I’d been dying to visit for a long time. He also said that he imagined that all English people would be aristocratic, reserved, cold and distant. I told him that while the stereotype was not for every English person, what is fairly true is that many English people want to buy a house with a big garden, with a big lawn to mow and a high fence to keep the neighbours out of their business. I gave Tom my brother as an example, of how him and his wife bought a house and now have set roles, Dominique’s role is in the house and Tom must mow the lawn every 2 weeks and keep it up to the standard that the previous owners did or the neighbours get funny. I explained that whilst I respected my brother’s way of life this lifestyle wasn’t for me, I was happy renting a flat, growing herbs on my windowsill, leaving my front door open and sharing my whole life with my neighbours, exchanging home grown fruit and vegetables, me not earning a penny more than my neighbours and our professions all contributing to a soceity in which everybody is happy rather than the focus being on owning more property.

Without further ado, there we were, this Cuban man and I, both having finished our hamburgers, our interesting conversation about Obama lifting the embargo on Cuba, the fitting together of more pieces of the political jigsaw of Latin America that I’d uncovered, our discussion about Chilean poetry. And it was there we parted, two people in the united by Grease and John Travolta and parted by two different hamburgers and two separate bills.

---