Here (Where Else?)

I really don't know where to start.

Maybe I should start with the ant (I really don't have too much time here, so I can't afford typos -- I have to type fast).

The ant in question's abdomen might have just overshot the head of a pin. But when I, sitting there in full sun on the "patio" outside our room, felt the full fury of the ant in question, it was more like the business end of the pin that was the culprit. On my inner thigh.

"Welcome to Cuba, senor!" he seemed to proclaim. Amazing how such a little thing can deliver such a message.

Anyway. I sit here in a small room. The sound of my fingers on the keys of this keyboard and the drone of the cooler, plus the murmurs of the lobby of Gran Club Santa Lucia are my auditory accompaniment.

I can't condense this into a fashion that can fit itself into the required space of half an hour. I simply can't type that fast. If I make a typo, so be it. Please excuse.

This is as much for me as it is for you, since I have not had access to a computer since, I think, the first day I got here, which would now be last Tuesday.

But in this land of heat, where "calor" is a verb, my tiny febrile brain has just been wanting to write it all down. Now i know where Ernest Hemingway got his muse. He just went. That was enough to fill a book. Too bad he didn't have the Internet. He would have made millions. Of typos.

I'll try to shorthand this, but it's really not possible here. Every moment is longhand. It just can't be compressed.

Suffice to say that I'm as brown as the brownest cockroach you ever saw. Bigitte is as red as the reddest lobster you ever saw.

My eyes, for some completely unexplained reason, are swollen, as if I walked into a boxing match with Sugar Ray and Mohammed in the same ring. I've already been to the "camp" doctor for a complete inspection for an entirely unrelated problem -- namely naively walking out in a semi-inebriated state (any other state here is impossible by Official Orders from Raul Himself) without my trusty shoes on into the "pristine" blue waters of the Caribbean. Of course, I immediately stubbed my toe on some malignant lionfish, which I didn't feel right away because their toxin is so poisonous that it numbs the brain first, then kills you after your next Cuba Libre, and thus awoke the next day to an angry, spreading red Big Toe.

I've seen that angry red spread before, so I knew that the only thing to do was get in the only taxi on the island, try to figure out the driver's name by osmosis, and get to Diana Doctora at the resort next door to this one. Next to the resort next to that resort. Near . . . El Resorto Nexta Ta El Resorto.

Anyway, after pretending to be a GP from my home town (hey, it worked for Leonard diCaprio in "Catch me If You Can") I scored some Amoxycillin (a drug of which I've heard!) and some unnameable painkiller.

(at this point, my half hour of Internet time ran out in the Cuban 15 minutes to which it had been allotted, so I take up even more of your time trying to explain why I'm taking up so much of your time).

which promptly made me have the worst nightmares that I've ever had, waking or sleeping. I awoke in a cold sweat, practically screaming to Brigitte that monsters -- no, not dinosaur monsters, but only the monsters the mind can produce -- were attacking me and could she just hold my shaking form for about ten minutes.

Anyway, I digress, and time is short. The medicine, I think, is working. My feet hurt just as much as they did before I got on the plane in Montreal.

I had the most amazing pizza I've ever had and it's coming from someone who knows! And I've been taking pictures of flora nd fauna and maybe some of them will qualify for my Exotic Plant Blog, but I've just been constantly dreaming of writing everything up and I'm no longer content with my spiral-bound and Bureau en Gros pen, so this will have to do for now.

See you guys maybe on Tuesday. Now I have a date with an Espresso. Fortified, of course.

Just like ol' Ernesto.