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Friday, October 22, 2004
Week One A Success
It's been a fabulous week here in Havana as we finish the first week of our tour. We have played a few concerts and seen a ;ot of cool stuff. And we have met some really lovely people. The Cuban people are very warm and friendly. This weekend we will be doing a little sightseeing into the interior of the country as well as doing a live TV broadcast and playing at a lively church service on Sunday. The guys in the team are having a great time together especially our Cuban students who love to play their African drums and play them most of the time including while travelling on the bus. We have seen very much of Havana as we travel back and forth and it is an amazing place. We all look forward to another great week. Saturday, October 16, 2004
Hola From Havana
I have been just settling in to our new digs here in Havana. The rest of the flight went swimmingly, a bit more comfortable as I had all three seats to myself. We are about to have our first rehearsal this afternoon after a tour of the city. The Cuban people are super, nice and friendly and I am picking up a lot of Spanish. Last night we were treated to an awesome concert by famous Cuban pianist Chichoo Valdez with a spectacular Latin rythm section. Kind of showed us what we were up aginst. I'm just getting to know my fellow musicains, there are a few new faces.
The accomodations are very nice. We have a newly renovated house with plenty of rooms but some faulty plumbing but nothing unbearable. We have no seat on the toilet! The internet is close so I should be able to update our status regularily, so stay tuned for more. Thursday, October 14, 2004
Halfway There
After a rather greuling four hour ride in a sardine can I have arrived in Toronto and am waiting for my connection. Two hours to go before boarding and not a Tim Hotons in sight. What a wasteland! Anyway I am still awake and doing fine. After all it's only six hours into the trip. Nothing to us seasoned globetrotters. Must run now before my time runs out on this kisky thing. Love to all. Wednesday, October 13, 2004
It's A Go
The last couple of days has been kind of a drag. With everything packed and ready to go all I can do is wait. I guess it would be worse if I had to work. Nevertheless I hit the tarmac tonight at 12:30 headed for TO and then on to Havana tomorrow. I picked up my passport from Purolator yesterday with great relief. Just last minute things to do now. Hopefully my next post will be from sunny Cuba.
I guess it would be very, very funny if it wasn't so sad but one can't help shake one's head over the Canadian Navy's submarine debacle. It does not put us Canadians in a very good light when we have to buy Britain's mothballed relics to become our entire sub fleet. And now they have grounded the lot of them due to the inquiry over the Chicoutemi fire, which is funny because only one of them was commissioned and sea worthy anyway. Navy brass are red faced and up to their ears in this scandal and there's questions being raised in Ottawa, where I'm sure somebody will deny any knowledge. It was quite a blow to hear that Christopher Reeve has died of a heart attack. It has shocked the world, especially considering that he will not be around to witness the fruits of his efforts into spinal cord repair research. Sunday, October 10, 2004
Talk about cutting it close. Because of the long weekend my passport remains "in transit" in the Purolator system until Tuesday. Once that is secured there is nothing left to do but pack and get ready for Wednesday evening. The instruments are on their way across the country to Toronto where we will have them loaded on an Air Cubana flight and sent down once we are in Havana. It will be interesting to see what shape they are in when we receive them there after their journey. I get to see how well my packing job holds up.
I'm still being impressed with Mozilla especially the tabbed browsing feature and I spent some time perusing their site yesterday looking at the various "extensions" you can get which are like plugins that enhance the features of Firefox with different little applications. Cool stuff. And last night I spent over an hour downloading Knoppix, the "load from CD" version of Linux. I haven't tried it out yet but I'm curious to see how well it works and if it is everything they say it is. Friday, October 08, 2004
The Trip Is On
After basically holding my breath for three days I can finally breath easy as I know my passport is making it's way home thanks to Purolator's online tracking system. The envelope was picked up in Montreal this afternoon around 2:00 so it should be back in plenty of time for my flight on Thursday. Phew! Thursday, October 07, 2004
Dueling Browsers
For the past little while I have heard a lot of people say a lot of good things about the Mozilla browser and how it blows the doors of Microsoft's Internet Explorer. So this morning I downloaded Mozilla Firefox to give it a trial run. So far I'm very impressed. The install was a snap, it even imported all my bookmarks and such and it seems that the pages load lightning fast. But one feature I really like is the tabbed browsing. It allows you to have several sites open in the same browser window without having to open (as in IE) another window. It also comes with a built in popup blocker which is always a good thing and a Google search window in the toolbar. Apparently there are lots of really cool plugins for it which I will experiment with once I'm done giving the thing a test drive. I am not quite ready to hand default browser duty to Mozilla yet but I think Internet Explorer's days are numbered, at least on my desktop. Wednesday, October 06, 2004
Bureaucratic Balderdash
I had to send my passport off by courier to Montreal yesterday, not something I felt too comfortable doing with only 8 days left until I leave. But we need special visas in Cuba and although they had authorized them last month already, nobody in Canada could find them. With three embassy offices in Canada the least likely one was in Montreal but after sweating bullets for a few days I phoned Montreal and sure enough that's where they were. So I am expecting my passport back by the end of this week or else there'll be trouble. The neat thing is I can track it online once it leaves the embassy in Montreal.
The instruments are still sitting in the living room but they should get picked up tomorrow. They will be stored at a church in Toronto until we can arrange the flight to Havana. Sunday, October 03, 2004
The weather has been downright nasty lately. Temperatures have been hovering just above freezing. So much for biking.
There is a mountain of shipping boxes in our living room as I prepare to send off the donated instruments to Cuba. Hopefully they will be picked up some time this week. We are hoping that they arrive in Havana while we are there so that we can oversea their arrival and unpacking, making sure they get into the right hands. I installed a new closet door in Dianne's study yesterday therby completing the reno project in that room. At some future point I plan to build her a new computer desk to replace the child's desk and work station she has in there now. Now that I have all those instruments out of my work shop I actually have some room to work. I want to build a new desk for myself and so will probably make it a nice little tandem winter project.
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