shudder
Reminds me of my first night in Cuba with my friend back in May. We were tired, since the plane was a late flight and we didn’t get checked in until midnight. We get up to the hotel room, and switch on the light, and immediately a large cockroach scuttles out of the washroom and across the hallway.
Then the light turns off, leaving the room pitch black. :eek: We both screamed like little girls (in our defense, we are women!)
We hit the switch again, and the cockroach is making its way towards the main part of the room.
Out go the lights. WTF???
This repeats itself, and finally my friend makes it to the desk and grabs a water glass and manages to trap the bug under it while I stand by the door and punch the light switch every 10 seconds.
My friend manages to call the front desk, to tell them the lights don’t work, and they laugh at her and tell her to put the key in the slot. A few seconds of confusion later, we realise that the front panel of the switch is missing, but there is something slot-like there, and so slip in the key-card and lo-and-behold, the lights stay on. It’s a power-saving (and cost-saving) measure by the hotel, so the lights and AC are off whenever you leave the room.
So at least now it’s light, but we still have this giant fucking cockroach crawling around the inside of this tiny water glass. My friend tries to scoop it up with a coaster, but can’t seem to do it, and we are laughing and squealing so much whenever it twitches that we just can’t accomplish much at all.
The attendant arrives at the door with our luggage, and we drag him inside and ask him to take care of it. He casually picks the glass and coaster and bug up, walks out to the hallway and chucks the cockroach out the window. We gratefully tip him (though it was a pathetic tip - we hadn’t had a chance to convert our money yet) and proceed to inspect the room.
No more cockroaches.
We step out onto the balcony to see what there is to be seen at 1am, and… a cockroach comes flying around the corner and lands right in front of us on the railing. We squeal and run back into the bedroom.
We didn’t use the balcony much. I swear, it was the same roach come back to torture us!
Other than that, though, the trip was pretty much bug free. One other day there was a roach in the hallway, but my friend used a towel to guide it towards the open door, and then locked it out.
Everything else about the trip was perfect.
Still, you should have seen us, freaking out in the first 20 minutes of our arrival in Cuba over this bug, and the power going out … it was ridiculous! We thought it was a bad sign about how the rest of the week would go, but thankfully, we were wrong 
