"Imodium doesn't work in CUBA"

So here is the tea on Cuba.

Honestly as a country it is absolutely stunning, its very true to its culture because it has not been Americanized which is great but... there are also some downsides to this.

This is not a post to hate on Cuba, I am simply going to tell you my experience travelling to this country.

So the reason my boyfriend and I chose to go to Cuba was because its supposed to be affordable, which to some extent it was, but if we compare how much we spent on our vacation compared to others who went to the same place... we overpaid for our stay. We booked our trip with SunWing and let me tell you, NEVER AGAIN (I'll come back to this in a bit). We stayed at a reputable hotel chain Ilberostar, located in Cayo Coco, which out of all the hotels in that area had the best reviews. The hotel itself was very nice, and one of the best beaches in Cuba was only a 10 minute walk away so it was prefect.

Now, because we are poor students, who probably shouldn't have even gone on vacation, we booked the "best deal" room. The actual room was total livable it had everything a standard room would have. We just had...you know a little bug problem. It started off as harmless ants, which were you know kind of annoying when they were in your bed and cloths, but nothing I can't handle.... Then came the fucking tarantulas. I don't know how these little shits got into the room but I was not a fan. The first night we saw one the little fucker hid behind the head board which was of course nailed to the wall sooooooo we slept on the other bed in the room and for our protection sprayed bug spray all over our bed and the surrounding areas. That helped till he came out of hiding which then my boyfriend managed to kill him and put our minds at ease, you know until we saw one on the smoke detector.

Now I know Cuba is not known for their food, but honestly it was not that bad. Our diet did consist of carbs and meat for the entire week, along with the occasional banana. We may have been a little too cautious about what we ate but we really didn't not want to spend our vacation sick in our hotel room.

We did save up a little spending money to take to Cuba incase we wanted any souvenirs or whatever, so we decided to spend our money on an excursion provided by SunWing. We booked the all- in- one excursion that was supposed to take us to swim with the dolphins, a tour of the closest city and we would end they day watching the sunset on a catamaran cruise. Sounds nice right! well the price was good too we thought, until we realized how worthless Canadian/American money was in Cuba. Now in Cuba the tourists have their own money that they must convert to in order to pay for things in Cuba called Convertible Pesos. So the excursion for the two of us would be 250 cuban convertible pesos, which converts to almost 350 American. What the actual fuck. This money they make the tourists use is not even recognized outside of Cuba as currency. I felt like I was getting robbed, it was ridiculous. I handed the man at the hotel $50 US and he gave me $26 Pesos and I couldn't believe it, no conversion charts not receipts nothing, it was so sketchy for all I know they could have been pocketing the money. So if you want to leave your resort and actually do something, you need to bring money hunny.

Now I did speak too soon when I said the food was great.... because my poor boyfriend contracted a parasite (at the time we thought was food poisoning) the day of our excursion. This brings me to why I will never fly with SunWing EVER again and why I am waiting for a $300 US check in the mail from them. Because he got sick we clearly couldn't go on the excursion, so on our receipt we were entitled to a refund, GREAT get my $300 US back! So we went to our travel rep and explained the situation and this man said "you need a doctors note to say you can't go"..... First of all where the FUCK are we going to find a DOCTOR IN CUBA?!?! thankfully, but not so thankful there was a doctor on site at the hotel. We go to see this doctor explain what our issue is and right of the bat he tried to scam us. When your sick and actually looking for help and relief and someone has the audacity to use you when your in need is disgusting. This "doctor" was trying to get us to buy an unreasonable amount of random medication to help which added up to $120 convertible Peso. We explained to him that we had all the medication needed and that all we needed was as note saying he was too unwell to go on the excursion. Now this guy who CLAIMS to be a doctor says "Imodium does not work in Cuba", I literally said to him ....is that a fucking joke. If this guy was truthfully honestly a doctor, he wouldn't have said that, he just wanted us to buy all this medication which was honestly probably TUMS. We turned him down and asked just for the noted which he charged us $30 convertible Peso for....... at this point we just wanted to get our money and go relax so we payed the $30 convertible peso and gave it to the travel rep. This man then goes on saying how he doesn't have the money on him and for us to come back at 10:00 am...... 10:00 am comes "I still don't have to money, come back at 4:00pm". So we go back to our room and try and relax until 4. The time comes when we have to go back and get our money, this guy is almost halfway outside the hotel when we get to his desk and he asks us for our receipt. Let me remind you because a lot of bullshit has happened, we gave him our receipt earlier and if we did loose it, he has the copy. He claims that he can't give us our money without it, so basically sucks to suck. We insisted that he give it to us after everything we encountered throughout the day and he said that "if you find your receipt and bring it to the airport (because we were leaving the next day) tomorrow, this travel rep will be there to give you your money". It was at the moment when I knew we would never see that money again. And I was right. We got to the airport the next day, we had found our joke of a receipt and waited for the travel rep. They were no where to be seen. We go to the front desk and ask them to call SunWing to see where this person was, she called and after getting off the phone she says "they are not coming in today". This story could have been way shorter and people probably don't care, but SunWing is supposed to be a reputable company and this is what happened, they bounce us back and forth and when the time comes to do the right thing they don't show up. I was absolutely appalled.

To top it all off our flight home was delayed 6 hours!

Thank you Cuba for your beauty but..... you couldn't pay me enough to go back.