Marathon → Key West

[amw]

Ah, first impressions. I think it might be the worst possible day to roll into an American town on Thanksgiving. I figured this was a holiday destination, so everything would be open, but it isn't, really

Comments

[amw]

I know it used to be that you needed a CPAP machine to deal with it, which would definitely be awkward and inconvenient to take camping, but are there other treatmeants that work now? I guess the nose clips don't work?

[coercedbynutmeg]

I've never been to Key West, but I know plenty of people who have been stationed in or detached to NAS Key West, and my impression from them was that the island was a hotbed of LGBT debauchery, but communities with Naval Aviation support also trend more conservative, so...?
The only other thing I know about Key West was that there was a city official named Bum Farto who was involved in drug trafficking and went missing in the late 70s, Jimmy Hoffa-style.

And yeah, in the US, Thanksgiving is often a harder holiday to find open businesses than Christmas. Sorry about that.

[amw]

I only discovered since arriving here that Key West has a gay reputation. To be honest, i don't get the sense it's all that gay, coming here on a weekend where there isn't any Pride or gay-specific event going on. There were a lot more openly-gay people on Miami Beach. This place feels more like what i imagine a cruise ship to be like. Lots of older straight couples getting very drunk. It's like a Jimmy Buffet song come to life, and that's not least because every second bar has a guitarist singing Jimmy Buffet songs. I can see why people like it here - for example, the cops don't enforce open container laws so people will stumble out of a bar with their plastic cup and walk out to watch the sunset over the ocean - but i don't think it's really my thing.

[olamina]

Oh God that thing where fucking coastal elites puff themselves up by making people in the rest of the country seem like just the worst bigoted ogres. Liberals are the worst; they are so blindly convinced of their own superiority that they render everyone else caricatures in their New Yorker magazine-informed ego plays.

[amw]

Sometimes when i read a conservative or centrist/contrarian take on the coastal elites i have to roll my eyes, because it's painting such a contrived picture of liberals. But every now and then i meet one of these rich liberals and it's like, wow, okay, now i see why they are so infuriating to some commentators. They do come across as condescending, without perhaps intending to

[olamina]

So true. Most of us are caught in the middle of country club squabbles. This idea of "two sides" or "two parties" only makes sense within the confines of that world, but they do work overtime (and by they I mean the media and government people) to try and convince us that their reality is everyone's. Kind of like The Big Lie that everyone in America is just some flavor of middle class.

[daphnep]

Who makes reservations at a restaurant?

Well, people trying to eat out during a pandemic, for sure. Here the restaurants are still doing spacing and capacity limits, so tables in them are a finite resource, and handled as such.

Am i the only person who walks into a restaurant and if i need to wait more than 10 seconds to be seated then i just go to another restaurant?

Probably not, but that would rule out most locally-owned places, here. (And I don’t live in a rich neighborhood.) You could get seated in 10 seconds at like…TGIFridays or a chain like that, I’ll bet. Or a college bar, because overcrowding is their thing, above food quality. But not like at…the good Thai place or Ethiopian or Puerto Rican or Israeli or the corner place our neighbor owns or any of the places you’d likely want to try, if visiting from out of town. Even our neighborhood pizza place is usually full and taking reservations, when we pick up takeout.

[amw]

I dunno, i've heard foodies say the same things about Melbourne, Toronto, NYC, San Fran, London and other cities where you frequently see lines out the door for popular restaurants... But somehow i've always been able to find delicious, local and affordable food in all of those cities, and in every other trendy city i've visited, without ever making a reservation.

It seems to me that if every restaurant in a neighborhood is always completely booked out, then that neighborhood is a kind of stealth food desert, because people who are passing through, or who don't have the privilege of being able to arrange their lives around going out to eat some specific date in the future, now can't find food there.

[daphnep]

We can eat delicious, local and affordable food just fine: we get it as takeout. On your bike you would easily find food trucks, too, and those are excellent, and we use those too. It’s the table for sitting at for an extended period that has the scarcity. Not so much a “food desert” as a “table desert.” And again: all evidence shows that Florida culture treats the pandemic very differently from northeastern states. It’s not at all surprising to hear it’s different there.