Bokeelia → Naples → Big Cypress → Miami Beach
I love Miami Beach. It is exactly like my dream of what it should be. It is seedy. Dirty. Glitzy. Glamorous. Fake. Gritty. It feels like a future city. But also with a legacy that hasn't been steamrolled to make way for new development.
It's the best kind of city.
But i'm jumping ahead. I left Pine Island a couple days ago, cycling first along Fort Myers Beach, then down the long Tamiami Trail (highway 41) to the next big town of Naples. I found a cheap hotel there, so didn't realize just how ritzy the place would be. Perhaps i should've noticed after crossing the causeways and mangroves of Lovers Key and hitting the mansions that followed. I checked into my hotel and went for a walk to get dinner.
I stopped into a Spanish restaurant that was way above my paygrade. I initially had an outdoor two-top, but was moved to the bar, either because they thought i wasn't going to spend as much as a snooty couple on a date, or because my just-cycled-off-the-island look was too ghetto for the joint. Everyone but me was suited up. So i sat at the bar and ordered drinks and tapas. Dude. Tapas was 10 bucks apiece. I ended up spending 75 bucks there for three drinks and three tapas. Dear lord.
I will say, though, the last tapa in particular, the fig and cheese, paired with a glass of pinot noir, it brought me back to Andalucía and made me realize just how i missed the laid back vibe of getting drinks on a warm night and grazing on tapas while listening to a live flamenco guitarist. I miss culture.
Earlier in the day i got another taste of a culture. At a vegan café on Fort Myers Beach i ordered a "bowl", which apparently is now shorthand for a particular dish that is spun off from an "açaí bowl", which i always just figured was a very expensive fruit salad. Well, turns out it is a very expensive fruit salad. But it's not just chopped fruit. First they blend a bunch of the ingredients into a cold, sweet, yogurt-like consistency, then top it with grains and nuts and things to add texture. It's interesting, and a trend that apparently blew up in the west while i wasn't paying attention to overpriced brunch and smoothie places. Since i'm in Florida i figured what the hell, right?
When i got home from the tapas bar i managed to fit in a couple hours of Skype chats with my friend R back in Canada. I still woke up at a respectable hour and got on my bike to head out to the Everglades, stopping in at a taquería along the way. Weirdly, the taco place was the first one i've been to in years where they were playing that Mexican oom-pah music, which i find hideous but also kind of hilarious at the same time. I also stopped at one of the two restaurants that exists along the whole western stretch of the road across the Everglades. Their schtick is they sell gator and crab, but it's very pricey since they're the only restaurant for miles around. Instead i got a sort of fry bread with salsa and some fried green tomatoes. The fry bread was not like (West) Indian fry bread, it was more like (East) Indian chapati or Chinese spring onion pancake. Not bad.
The Everglades is some serious swamp, though, man. It goes on for a long time, sometimes a cypress swamp, sometimes a big ol' marsh, always very wet. But the road was pretty heavily-trafficked, so it never felt all that desolate, despite the fact there isn't much out there. I stopped off at two little roadside parks to walk along the boardwalks, and it was definitely some of the creepiest walks i ever took, with water underfoot and drizzle dripping from the sky and thick, knobby trees tangled up overhead. Saw a bunch of gators too. They are ominous as hell when they're in the water, just silently gliding around with their eyes poking out, waiting to chomp on something.
I camped out by a gator-filled lake next to a bunch of other campers - mostly families who were taking their kids out for a weekend in the bush. There was another bike tourer just opposite me, but we just said hi and that was that. There is definitely a sort of bike tourer who - like me - just enjoys the quiet independence of a self-supported journey, and doesn't want to chatter about gear or miles per day or whatever other stuff the trail-riding cyclists tend to do.
There were bear boxes at the campsite, and when i reached into the slot to open the box, i got a handful of frog. The fucking thing slithered past my fingers and jumped out of the slot. Thank God it wasn't a snake, or a spider, i suppose.
It rained overnight, but i woke to a delightful rainbow. Since all my shit was wet and it was still damp and humid as hell, i just packed up and headed out by 8am. I also really wanted to get to Miami before 4pm, when the person i had been talking to on the phone booking my hotel was going off her shift. (She had said if i got there while she was on shift she'd let me take my bike into the room - a standard thing at motels, but hotels are a bit more fussy.) I did, however, decide to take a 30km detour down a scenic loop road, after first confirming with a hunter that the gravel surface would be okay on a bike.
That's when i really felt like i was properly in the Everglades. There wasn't any other traffic on the road, and when i stopped my bike, the only sounds i could hear were the creatures of the swamp. Creepy as hell, but also kinda awesome.
Popping back out of the loop road and onto the highway sucked. Traffic. Rain. Ugh. The last stretch of the Everglades is mostly just marsh with the odd roadside stop for airboat tours. I stopped at one place round Miccosukee country that had a sign for fry bread, and it was proper Indian fry bread, with honey this time. Fry bread and honey is very good.
Getting into Miami had a different feeling from the suburbs on the Gulf Coast. The city is very skinny because it can't expand west into the Everglades, and the part where i entered seems to mostly be older developments. I rode through one thing that clearly used to be a gated community - it still had the guard towers - but now was just a very inconvenient spaghetti junction of deliberately circuitous roads that annoyed everyone trying to drive through it. Then it switched up to the usual grid pattern, which makes traffic somewhat less painful because it can spread out more organically. I cycled through some fairly sketchy areas, but nothing nearly as scary as those godawful stretches in Texas where dogs would chase me down the road. I can deal with gangsters or idle youngsters hollering and cat-calling. At least they won't come at me for no fucking reason.
The roads were lined with palm trees. Reggaeton blasting dembow rhythms from every open car window. Everyone speaking Spanish. Literally everyone. But it's when i started going over the Venetian Causeway to Miami Beach that it was just like... fuck. Yes. Here i fucking am.
Miami is the city that was number one on my American bucket list, and - in fact - number one on my worldwide urban bucket list to visit. It's played such a central role in my fantasy of what America means. Probably starting from Miami Vice. Those iconic opening credits with Jan Hammer's unforgettable theme tune. The moody visuals as Crocket's Theme plays, or In The Air Tonight. Neon. Sunsets. Nightclubs. Sweat. Palm trees. Fast cars. Pastel suits. Art deco. And then everything that leaned on Miami Vice as a visual influence, notably the Grand Theft Auto computer games. Freestyle music. Company B. Debbie Deb. Look out weekend, because, here i come! Gloria Estefan. The legendary Winter Music Conference, the annual international gathering of house music DJs and artists, a place where all the new hits first get broken. The place is damn near mythological in dance music, perhaps even moreso than NYC, Chicago and Detroit, in the same way that Ibiza seems more magical than London or Berlin, simply because it's more exotic.
And, yeah, sitting on that causeway with the bridge up while some rich shitheels drove their superyacht through, side-by-side with extremely attractive and scantily-clad young men and women, muscles, tans, curves in all the right places... And then people swearing at each other to get out of the road, and yelling, and gesticulating, and blasting their tunes, riding mopeds... Yeah. I clearly wasn't in Kansas any more.
I'm happy to say Miami, or the South Beach section of Miami Beach at least, has basically fulfilled my every expectation. I could walk around and hang out here for so much longer than i did. It is such a wonderful spot for people watching. Everything is so beautiful. The weather is hot. The ocean actually has surf, not this pissant little ebb and flow in the Gulf. The people are sexy. Their clothes are stylish. The cars are grotesquely expensive. But there is obviously poverty too, and homelessness, and drug addiction. South Beach has a sort of charming shabbiness, despite the vast amounts of money that are thrown around. Almost everyone speaks Spanish, and they're from all over Latin America. It feels like a holiday destination for the whole of the Americas, not just some resort for pasty northerners who want to escape the snow.
I was exhausted after waking up at 6am and cycling over 110km from the middle of the Everglades, but i was determined to go out clubbing, even if only for an hour or two. Unfortunately, most of the outdoor lounges are private and attached to various hotels and resorts. Even though the music blasting out of them was sometimes very much up my alley, the people would probably have been far too snooty for me to enjoy it. If i could even get in wearing my raggedy-ass clothes. I did eventually find one place where i could get in and order a few drinks, although i was advised by the bouncer that i couldn't take a seat outside unless i was with a table. I remarked to the bartender that i must look very sad, being the only person here on my own. She said that she just moved here from New Orleans and had the same problem. It's not a town where people go out by themselves and socialize mostly with strangers. The bars aren't really designed that way.
Well, at least one of them is, but i only found that out later.
I plugged through at the bar till 9pm when i headed to a club that was doing a Sunday session. Of course, like a noob, i got there about 10 minutes after the posted opening time and they hadn't opened yet. I went to the gas station next door and ordered a Cuban coffee and a bread roll.
This, by the way, is another great European-style thing that Miami has. They actually have small bread rolls with various hams or cheeses. Not some bullshit sandwich made from floppy American sliced bread, or a bland submarine bun, or some such shit. An actual, real bread roll. Like, a crispy, chewy thing with some texture and mouthfeel. And - like Australia - everywhere has an espresso machine. So you can get strong, black coffee in tiny little cups and a thick hunk of bread, at any time of day or night, for just a couple of dollars. Fantastic.
Revitalized, i walked into the club and proceeded to dance pretty much non-stop for 2 hours.
Some notes that i forgot about North American nightclubs. Beer costs $9 for a small can, and you are expected to tip the bartender on top of that. There is always a person of color standing in the toilets, a so-called bathroom attendant who will give you a mint or a moist towelette for a tip. That shit creeps me the fuck out and it should be banned. Bottle service. Fuck fucking bottle service, the douchiest invention of all time. (For people who never went to an American club, that means you buy a very overpriced entire bottle of liquor for your table, then you get "free" mixers to go with it, and occasionally sexy private hostesses to pour it for you.)
But this was still an "underground" nightclub, so it was probably still much less obnoxious than the places where celebs show their faces, or where music that isn't techno gets played.
Well, it wasn't really techno. The main room was progressive house. The side room was tech house. Both of these "houses" are pretty much house in name only. They bear little resemblance to Chicago house, aka house music, The Black Kind. Progressive house is what happened when trance fans got old and started playing their trance really slow. Tech house is what happened when techno got "commercial" (within the context of underground dance music) and people realized that snare drum rolls and predictable build-ups, break-downs and 16-bar progressions appealed to a larger crowd than the sort of anything-goes punkish attitude of earlier techno.
Of course, being electronic music, there are also about 27 different subgenres of tech house, and our first DJ played it right on the edge of deep house and tech house. Not deep house, The Black Kind, but deep house, The German Kind. Which is different from deep house, The Berlin Kind, which is ironically more Latin American influenced than The German Kind, which still keeps some nods to the Chicago roots.
I won't bore you with the details. Short version is i dug the first DJ's set. Then the second DJ came on and started blasting out very loud, formulaic, tedious fucking tech house at 126bpm, all boom ts boom ts boom ts pause, boom ts boom ts boom ts pause, and i couldn't get into the groove any more.
One of the things i loved about Berlin is that there were so many clubs i could find the one room in the one club that would often play 24 hours straight of the music i liked. But i forgot that outside of Berlin i will usually only get a couple of hours, and the rest is just filler.
Of course, the other kids were loving it. The club was packed. It's my first time out since COVID, and nobody was masked, and there was no vaccine check, and people were coughing all over the place, and passing around drugs, and drinks, and it seemed like a massive fucking super-spreader event. But i had to remind myself that this is what Florida has pretty much been the whole time.
I was talking to an Israeli at the bar earlier who shat on his own country and Europe for the on-again, off-again lockdowns, "Florida is the only free place in the world". Sigh. That's a common refrain since i got to this state. Dude also said - in response to me saying i was tired - that i could go back to my hotel and sleep, then head to Space - a much bigger and more famous nightclub hosting Berlin legends Marcel Dettman and Ben Klock - around 5am. "Where else in the world can you do that?" He asked, as if Berlin didn't exist. If i was in Berlin i wouldn't have been wasting my time clubbing at 9pm, i would've had a proper night's sleep, and eaten breakfast, and rolled in just before lunch to dance away the whole afternoon. I also wouldn't have paid $9 for a drink. To quote one tourist from somewhere in the British Caribbean (judging by accent), "i'm not paying that much, this isn't London!"
I did have a few chats with some folks outside. As usual once everyone's drugs started kicking in the whole party ended up in the side alley, with people talking utter nonsense to one another at a hundred miles an hour. Even when you're not on drugs it's pretty entertaining to listen in. Except... everyone was speaking fucking Spanish. Lordy. In the rest of America it sometimes seems that Spanish-speakers are exclusively cleaners and gardeners and construction workers, but in Miami they are cashed the fuck up. This Tony Montana lookin' dude in his button-up shirt walked through giving pretty much everyone around him a bump of coke, in a kind of grossly aggressive way that would've had me recoiling even before corona. These beautiful kids dressed far more expensively than most clubbers i normally hang out with sprung for bottle service like it weren't no thing. Some tourist saw my skinny ass standing in the corner with no friends and asked me if i could sell him drugs. I told him alas, i too was a tourist and could not help him. Although, i did meet a fair few tourists who were high as kites. It was easy to spot them, because they couldn't speak Spanish.
Well, to be fair, plenty of tourists were from Latin America too. I got to see a bit of the Latin hierarchy in action, where Mexicans are considered lower class by cashed-up Colombians and Cubans, and maybe Dominicans are lower class than Puerto Ricans? God, it's a complex politics that i don't even want to pretend that i understand. I also got told that people in Miami are unfriendly "because they're poor", which i will give the benefit of the doubt that this was an awkward translation to English and not some classist snobbishness on behalf of the disheveled raver who said so.
Eventually i realized it wasn't worth waiting even longer for the music to get better, so i left. I was in bed by 2am, which is Very Fucking Late for me, but the town was still reasonably busy and hopping at that hour, which makes a nice change from all the boring-ass cities and towns i have visited since Berlin. It feels like people actually enjoy their lives here.
I woke up with a sore throat, and i really hope it's because of breathing in all the smoke and not because i got COVID.
I also had a hangover, so i spent all day today just wandering aimlessly around South Beach. Not completely aimlessly - i did go to Best Buy to get snag a new (open box) phone in the Black Friday sale. It's annoying that i had to buy yet another new phone, but the screen on my previous new one is so smashed up that in this tropical humidity it's almost certain to frazzle within a week. I know. I went through phones like they were made out of tissue paper when i lived in subtropical Australia.
I ate vegan food. I walked along the beach. I sat on a rock looking at the skyline, and then on another rock to watch the superyachts going by. I drank in the sun, and the Spanish, and the French and the German and all the other languages of people who came here on holiday. Then i found a dive bar, which turned out to be a little island of English-speakers. The whole place was just one pool table, one juke box, and a long, squiggly bar that encouraged strangers to talk to each other. I liked sitting at the bar, drinking two-for-one drinks, listening to the locals natter on about whatever damn shit was going on in their lives. One of the local gays tried to pick me up, till he realized i didn't have the 9 inch cock he was hoping for. Then i made the mistake of mentioning the language thing, and - oy vey - out pops the "they come to our country and they don't even bother to learn English" canard. Sigh. It doesn't take a genius to see that Miami is a Spanish-speaking city. English-speakers are the minority here. If you point-blank refuse to learn Spanish then you are the outsider who is relegating yourself to a linguistic ghetto, not them.
To finish the night, i decided to go to a divey Cuban snack bar. Instead of ordering the famous Cuban sandwich, i ordered the less-famous Medianoche sandwich, which is pretty much the same thing but on sweet challah-style bread. It was full of meat and cheese and mustard and mayonnaise and pickles and it was delicious.
And, God, this is just two nights spent in South Beach. There is a whole massive chunk of Miami proper that i just cycled through to get here and didn't have time to really enjoy. Calle Ocho. Wynwood. The building with a hole in it, Atlantis Condominium. Islands, piers, beaches further north. Are there flamingos somewhere? Miami Vice tells me there must be flamingos. But i won't see any of that because tomorrow i cycle 110km to Key Largo, another bucket list destination for me, thanks to Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall.
I think i need to visit Miami again. It is not a cheap place to hang out. Even if you just eat little bread rolls (which i don't know the Spanish name for) and drink those strong, sweet black coffees (which are called "coladas"), the accommodation is pricey as all hell. And the clubbing, fuck me. I forgot you can blow through a couple hundred bucks a night over here, easy. But the music... The music is everywhere. The weather is fantastic. There are fucking bright green iguanas scurrying around. It's tropical. There's palm trees, damnit, growing right up next to picturesque mid-rise apartment blocks, and people rollerblading and scootering and bicycling around, just enjoying their damn lives. What an awesome place. I'm sure i'd get disillusioned if i hung around too long, but that's true of everywhere.
I like Miami.
But tomorrow i continue.
It's the best kind of city.
But i'm jumping ahead. I left Pine Island a couple days ago, cycling first along Fort Myers Beach, then down the long Tamiami Trail (highway 41) to the next big town of Naples. I found a cheap hotel there, so didn't realize just how ritzy the place would be. Perhaps i should've noticed after crossing the causeways and mangroves of Lovers Key and hitting the mansions that followed. I checked into my hotel and went for a walk to get dinner.
I stopped into a Spanish restaurant that was way above my paygrade. I initially had an outdoor two-top, but was moved to the bar, either because they thought i wasn't going to spend as much as a snooty couple on a date, or because my just-cycled-off-the-island look was too ghetto for the joint. Everyone but me was suited up. So i sat at the bar and ordered drinks and tapas. Dude. Tapas was 10 bucks apiece. I ended up spending 75 bucks there for three drinks and three tapas. Dear lord.
I will say, though, the last tapa in particular, the fig and cheese, paired with a glass of pinot noir, it brought me back to Andalucía and made me realize just how i missed the laid back vibe of getting drinks on a warm night and grazing on tapas while listening to a live flamenco guitarist. I miss culture.
Earlier in the day i got another taste of a culture. At a vegan café on Fort Myers Beach i ordered a "bowl", which apparently is now shorthand for a particular dish that is spun off from an "açaí bowl", which i always just figured was a very expensive fruit salad. Well, turns out it is a very expensive fruit salad. But it's not just chopped fruit. First they blend a bunch of the ingredients into a cold, sweet, yogurt-like consistency, then top it with grains and nuts and things to add texture. It's interesting, and a trend that apparently blew up in the west while i wasn't paying attention to overpriced brunch and smoothie places. Since i'm in Florida i figured what the hell, right?
When i got home from the tapas bar i managed to fit in a couple hours of Skype chats with my friend R back in Canada. I still woke up at a respectable hour and got on my bike to head out to the Everglades, stopping in at a taquería along the way. Weirdly, the taco place was the first one i've been to in years where they were playing that Mexican oom-pah music, which i find hideous but also kind of hilarious at the same time. I also stopped at one of the two restaurants that exists along the whole western stretch of the road across the Everglades. Their schtick is they sell gator and crab, but it's very pricey since they're the only restaurant for miles around. Instead i got a sort of fry bread with salsa and some fried green tomatoes. The fry bread was not like (West) Indian fry bread, it was more like (East) Indian chapati or Chinese spring onion pancake. Not bad.
The Everglades is some serious swamp, though, man. It goes on for a long time, sometimes a cypress swamp, sometimes a big ol' marsh, always very wet. But the road was pretty heavily-trafficked, so it never felt all that desolate, despite the fact there isn't much out there. I stopped off at two little roadside parks to walk along the boardwalks, and it was definitely some of the creepiest walks i ever took, with water underfoot and drizzle dripping from the sky and thick, knobby trees tangled up overhead. Saw a bunch of gators too. They are ominous as hell when they're in the water, just silently gliding around with their eyes poking out, waiting to chomp on something.
I camped out by a gator-filled lake next to a bunch of other campers - mostly families who were taking their kids out for a weekend in the bush. There was another bike tourer just opposite me, but we just said hi and that was that. There is definitely a sort of bike tourer who - like me - just enjoys the quiet independence of a self-supported journey, and doesn't want to chatter about gear or miles per day or whatever other stuff the trail-riding cyclists tend to do.
There were bear boxes at the campsite, and when i reached into the slot to open the box, i got a handful of frog. The fucking thing slithered past my fingers and jumped out of the slot. Thank God it wasn't a snake, or a spider, i suppose.
It rained overnight, but i woke to a delightful rainbow. Since all my shit was wet and it was still damp and humid as hell, i just packed up and headed out by 8am. I also really wanted to get to Miami before 4pm, when the person i had been talking to on the phone booking my hotel was going off her shift. (She had said if i got there while she was on shift she'd let me take my bike into the room - a standard thing at motels, but hotels are a bit more fussy.) I did, however, decide to take a 30km detour down a scenic loop road, after first confirming with a hunter that the gravel surface would be okay on a bike.
That's when i really felt like i was properly in the Everglades. There wasn't any other traffic on the road, and when i stopped my bike, the only sounds i could hear were the creatures of the swamp. Creepy as hell, but also kinda awesome.
Popping back out of the loop road and onto the highway sucked. Traffic. Rain. Ugh. The last stretch of the Everglades is mostly just marsh with the odd roadside stop for airboat tours. I stopped at one place round Miccosukee country that had a sign for fry bread, and it was proper Indian fry bread, with honey this time. Fry bread and honey is very good.
Getting into Miami had a different feeling from the suburbs on the Gulf Coast. The city is very skinny because it can't expand west into the Everglades, and the part where i entered seems to mostly be older developments. I rode through one thing that clearly used to be a gated community - it still had the guard towers - but now was just a very inconvenient spaghetti junction of deliberately circuitous roads that annoyed everyone trying to drive through it. Then it switched up to the usual grid pattern, which makes traffic somewhat less painful because it can spread out more organically. I cycled through some fairly sketchy areas, but nothing nearly as scary as those godawful stretches in Texas where dogs would chase me down the road. I can deal with gangsters or idle youngsters hollering and cat-calling. At least they won't come at me for no fucking reason.
The roads were lined with palm trees. Reggaeton blasting dembow rhythms from every open car window. Everyone speaking Spanish. Literally everyone. But it's when i started going over the Venetian Causeway to Miami Beach that it was just like... fuck. Yes. Here i fucking am.
Miami is the city that was number one on my American bucket list, and - in fact - number one on my worldwide urban bucket list to visit. It's played such a central role in my fantasy of what America means. Probably starting from Miami Vice. Those iconic opening credits with Jan Hammer's unforgettable theme tune. The moody visuals as Crocket's Theme plays, or In The Air Tonight. Neon. Sunsets. Nightclubs. Sweat. Palm trees. Fast cars. Pastel suits. Art deco. And then everything that leaned on Miami Vice as a visual influence, notably the Grand Theft Auto computer games. Freestyle music. Company B. Debbie Deb. Look out weekend, because, here i come! Gloria Estefan. The legendary Winter Music Conference, the annual international gathering of house music DJs and artists, a place where all the new hits first get broken. The place is damn near mythological in dance music, perhaps even moreso than NYC, Chicago and Detroit, in the same way that Ibiza seems more magical than London or Berlin, simply because it's more exotic.
And, yeah, sitting on that causeway with the bridge up while some rich shitheels drove their superyacht through, side-by-side with extremely attractive and scantily-clad young men and women, muscles, tans, curves in all the right places... And then people swearing at each other to get out of the road, and yelling, and gesticulating, and blasting their tunes, riding mopeds... Yeah. I clearly wasn't in Kansas any more.
I'm happy to say Miami, or the South Beach section of Miami Beach at least, has basically fulfilled my every expectation. I could walk around and hang out here for so much longer than i did. It is such a wonderful spot for people watching. Everything is so beautiful. The weather is hot. The ocean actually has surf, not this pissant little ebb and flow in the Gulf. The people are sexy. Their clothes are stylish. The cars are grotesquely expensive. But there is obviously poverty too, and homelessness, and drug addiction. South Beach has a sort of charming shabbiness, despite the vast amounts of money that are thrown around. Almost everyone speaks Spanish, and they're from all over Latin America. It feels like a holiday destination for the whole of the Americas, not just some resort for pasty northerners who want to escape the snow.
I was exhausted after waking up at 6am and cycling over 110km from the middle of the Everglades, but i was determined to go out clubbing, even if only for an hour or two. Unfortunately, most of the outdoor lounges are private and attached to various hotels and resorts. Even though the music blasting out of them was sometimes very much up my alley, the people would probably have been far too snooty for me to enjoy it. If i could even get in wearing my raggedy-ass clothes. I did eventually find one place where i could get in and order a few drinks, although i was advised by the bouncer that i couldn't take a seat outside unless i was with a table. I remarked to the bartender that i must look very sad, being the only person here on my own. She said that she just moved here from New Orleans and had the same problem. It's not a town where people go out by themselves and socialize mostly with strangers. The bars aren't really designed that way.
Well, at least one of them is, but i only found that out later.
I plugged through at the bar till 9pm when i headed to a club that was doing a Sunday session. Of course, like a noob, i got there about 10 minutes after the posted opening time and they hadn't opened yet. I went to the gas station next door and ordered a Cuban coffee and a bread roll.
This, by the way, is another great European-style thing that Miami has. They actually have small bread rolls with various hams or cheeses. Not some bullshit sandwich made from floppy American sliced bread, or a bland submarine bun, or some such shit. An actual, real bread roll. Like, a crispy, chewy thing with some texture and mouthfeel. And - like Australia - everywhere has an espresso machine. So you can get strong, black coffee in tiny little cups and a thick hunk of bread, at any time of day or night, for just a couple of dollars. Fantastic.
Revitalized, i walked into the club and proceeded to dance pretty much non-stop for 2 hours.
Some notes that i forgot about North American nightclubs. Beer costs $9 for a small can, and you are expected to tip the bartender on top of that. There is always a person of color standing in the toilets, a so-called bathroom attendant who will give you a mint or a moist towelette for a tip. That shit creeps me the fuck out and it should be banned. Bottle service. Fuck fucking bottle service, the douchiest invention of all time. (For people who never went to an American club, that means you buy a very overpriced entire bottle of liquor for your table, then you get "free" mixers to go with it, and occasionally sexy private hostesses to pour it for you.)
But this was still an "underground" nightclub, so it was probably still much less obnoxious than the places where celebs show their faces, or where music that isn't techno gets played.
Well, it wasn't really techno. The main room was progressive house. The side room was tech house. Both of these "houses" are pretty much house in name only. They bear little resemblance to Chicago house, aka house music, The Black Kind. Progressive house is what happened when trance fans got old and started playing their trance really slow. Tech house is what happened when techno got "commercial" (within the context of underground dance music) and people realized that snare drum rolls and predictable build-ups, break-downs and 16-bar progressions appealed to a larger crowd than the sort of anything-goes punkish attitude of earlier techno.
Of course, being electronic music, there are also about 27 different subgenres of tech house, and our first DJ played it right on the edge of deep house and tech house. Not deep house, The Black Kind, but deep house, The German Kind. Which is different from deep house, The Berlin Kind, which is ironically more Latin American influenced than The German Kind, which still keeps some nods to the Chicago roots.
I won't bore you with the details. Short version is i dug the first DJ's set. Then the second DJ came on and started blasting out very loud, formulaic, tedious fucking tech house at 126bpm, all boom ts boom ts boom ts pause, boom ts boom ts boom ts pause, and i couldn't get into the groove any more.
One of the things i loved about Berlin is that there were so many clubs i could find the one room in the one club that would often play 24 hours straight of the music i liked. But i forgot that outside of Berlin i will usually only get a couple of hours, and the rest is just filler.
Of course, the other kids were loving it. The club was packed. It's my first time out since COVID, and nobody was masked, and there was no vaccine check, and people were coughing all over the place, and passing around drugs, and drinks, and it seemed like a massive fucking super-spreader event. But i had to remind myself that this is what Florida has pretty much been the whole time.
I was talking to an Israeli at the bar earlier who shat on his own country and Europe for the on-again, off-again lockdowns, "Florida is the only free place in the world". Sigh. That's a common refrain since i got to this state. Dude also said - in response to me saying i was tired - that i could go back to my hotel and sleep, then head to Space - a much bigger and more famous nightclub hosting Berlin legends Marcel Dettman and Ben Klock - around 5am. "Where else in the world can you do that?" He asked, as if Berlin didn't exist. If i was in Berlin i wouldn't have been wasting my time clubbing at 9pm, i would've had a proper night's sleep, and eaten breakfast, and rolled in just before lunch to dance away the whole afternoon. I also wouldn't have paid $9 for a drink. To quote one tourist from somewhere in the British Caribbean (judging by accent), "i'm not paying that much, this isn't London!"
I did have a few chats with some folks outside. As usual once everyone's drugs started kicking in the whole party ended up in the side alley, with people talking utter nonsense to one another at a hundred miles an hour. Even when you're not on drugs it's pretty entertaining to listen in. Except... everyone was speaking fucking Spanish. Lordy. In the rest of America it sometimes seems that Spanish-speakers are exclusively cleaners and gardeners and construction workers, but in Miami they are cashed the fuck up. This Tony Montana lookin' dude in his button-up shirt walked through giving pretty much everyone around him a bump of coke, in a kind of grossly aggressive way that would've had me recoiling even before corona. These beautiful kids dressed far more expensively than most clubbers i normally hang out with sprung for bottle service like it weren't no thing. Some tourist saw my skinny ass standing in the corner with no friends and asked me if i could sell him drugs. I told him alas, i too was a tourist and could not help him. Although, i did meet a fair few tourists who were high as kites. It was easy to spot them, because they couldn't speak Spanish.
Well, to be fair, plenty of tourists were from Latin America too. I got to see a bit of the Latin hierarchy in action, where Mexicans are considered lower class by cashed-up Colombians and Cubans, and maybe Dominicans are lower class than Puerto Ricans? God, it's a complex politics that i don't even want to pretend that i understand. I also got told that people in Miami are unfriendly "because they're poor", which i will give the benefit of the doubt that this was an awkward translation to English and not some classist snobbishness on behalf of the disheveled raver who said so.
Eventually i realized it wasn't worth waiting even longer for the music to get better, so i left. I was in bed by 2am, which is Very Fucking Late for me, but the town was still reasonably busy and hopping at that hour, which makes a nice change from all the boring-ass cities and towns i have visited since Berlin. It feels like people actually enjoy their lives here.
I woke up with a sore throat, and i really hope it's because of breathing in all the smoke and not because i got COVID.
I also had a hangover, so i spent all day today just wandering aimlessly around South Beach. Not completely aimlessly - i did go to Best Buy to get snag a new (open box) phone in the Black Friday sale. It's annoying that i had to buy yet another new phone, but the screen on my previous new one is so smashed up that in this tropical humidity it's almost certain to frazzle within a week. I know. I went through phones like they were made out of tissue paper when i lived in subtropical Australia.
I ate vegan food. I walked along the beach. I sat on a rock looking at the skyline, and then on another rock to watch the superyachts going by. I drank in the sun, and the Spanish, and the French and the German and all the other languages of people who came here on holiday. Then i found a dive bar, which turned out to be a little island of English-speakers. The whole place was just one pool table, one juke box, and a long, squiggly bar that encouraged strangers to talk to each other. I liked sitting at the bar, drinking two-for-one drinks, listening to the locals natter on about whatever damn shit was going on in their lives. One of the local gays tried to pick me up, till he realized i didn't have the 9 inch cock he was hoping for. Then i made the mistake of mentioning the language thing, and - oy vey - out pops the "they come to our country and they don't even bother to learn English" canard. Sigh. It doesn't take a genius to see that Miami is a Spanish-speaking city. English-speakers are the minority here. If you point-blank refuse to learn Spanish then you are the outsider who is relegating yourself to a linguistic ghetto, not them.
To finish the night, i decided to go to a divey Cuban snack bar. Instead of ordering the famous Cuban sandwich, i ordered the less-famous Medianoche sandwich, which is pretty much the same thing but on sweet challah-style bread. It was full of meat and cheese and mustard and mayonnaise and pickles and it was delicious.
And, God, this is just two nights spent in South Beach. There is a whole massive chunk of Miami proper that i just cycled through to get here and didn't have time to really enjoy. Calle Ocho. Wynwood. The building with a hole in it, Atlantis Condominium. Islands, piers, beaches further north. Are there flamingos somewhere? Miami Vice tells me there must be flamingos. But i won't see any of that because tomorrow i cycle 110km to Key Largo, another bucket list destination for me, thanks to Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall.
I think i need to visit Miami again. It is not a cheap place to hang out. Even if you just eat little bread rolls (which i don't know the Spanish name for) and drink those strong, sweet black coffees (which are called "coladas"), the accommodation is pricey as all hell. And the clubbing, fuck me. I forgot you can blow through a couple hundred bucks a night over here, easy. But the music... The music is everywhere. The weather is fantastic. There are fucking bright green iguanas scurrying around. It's tropical. There's palm trees, damnit, growing right up next to picturesque mid-rise apartment blocks, and people rollerblading and scootering and bicycling around, just enjoying their damn lives. What an awesome place. I'm sure i'd get disillusioned if i hung around too long, but that's true of everywhere.
I like Miami.
But tomorrow i continue.