Miami Nice?
Everyone has pre-conceived ideas about Miami. Palm lined avenues, cops in Ferraris, babes in bikinis, white jackets with the arms pushed up. Yeah, okay, all I knew about Miami came from Miami Vice. The flip side to this glamour is the drug trade, violence and general seediness. Fortunately this is a somewhat exaggerated view of the city, at least in our experience.
We arrived at the airport mid-morning, our flight from Montreal having left at 5am. We got a taxi into town along quiet avenues, the sun glinting off the large glass and white-painted hotels and giving the water a lovely deep blue colour. The roads crossed bridges over harbours dotted with gleaming yachts, and there was none of the grotty neighbourhoods you might expect to pass on a drive from an airport into a major city.
The taxi pulled up outside our hotel, and we were greeted by a smiling guy in white trousers and a casual patel coloured shirt who welcomed us to the hotel. Actually he welcomed us to The Hotel, as that was the name of the place we were staying. It's a small boutique-style place, and apparently the furnishings and decor were designed by Todd Oldham. I can't say I'd ever heard of Mr Oldham, but then I'm hardly a fashionista. The staff were probably some of the friendliest people I've ever met working in a hotel; chatty, smiling and very welcoming. Our room was decorated in white and pastel colours, lemon, green, blue which fitted the setting perfectly. We did the usual, opening cupboards, bouncing on the matress, playing with taps, examining the mini-bar then had a wander around the hotel. It was small by American standards, being only about five stories with a few rooms on each, but this part of Miami, South Beach, is quite low-rise and from the top of the hotel we could see the beach one block away. The top floor was divided into two, one half being an open-air bar similar to the one we'd visited in Puerto Rico, the other being a swimming pool and bar. Noting these for later use, we headed down for lunch in the restaurant. The food was elegant, well presented and in sensible sized portions, something of a welcome change for the States.
After lunch we hit the shops. I was feeling a little bit scruffy surrounded by all this elegance, so hunted out a smartish-but-casual shirt that wouldn't look out of place in the restaurant. There was a surprisingly good selection of affordable shops amongst the Gucci, Armani and Tiffany emporia, and the streets around the hotel were mostly well-preserved art deco buildings. One or two streets away though and these got a bit run-down and rather more tacky - too much neon, a few too many burger joints and the like. So we headed back to the hotel, dumped the shopping and headed for the beach.
What a beach it is. Beautiful golden sand, a lovely aquamarine ocean and enough space to relax. Our hotel had a reserved bit of the beach, with padded sun loungers and umbrellas to shelter us from the strong sun. The sea was just the right temperature, cool enough to be refreshing, warm enough to be able to dive straight in (I'll never forget the experience of trying to cool down in the seas around Thailand and finding it considerably warmer than the air temperature). There were a few people around strutting their stuff and exhibiting their perfectly toned bodies, but it wasn't as intimidating as I expected and my pale untoned torso didn't attract the sniggers I'd feared. You might think this would be the place to get an all over tan, but I burn so easily that I spent most of the time hiding under the umbrella. Just as things cooled down enough to risk pulling the lounger from the shade, the attendant came over and made it quite clear that he wanted to leave, and therefore so should we.
We walked back, swapped the towels for the smarter clothing, and headed off to find a little entertainment. Our guide had warned us that Miami doesn't really do bars in the usual sense. People either drank in restaurants, or in trendy hotel bars, often on the top floor of the building (just like in our hotetl in fact). The problem with this is that it's very hard to choose where to go. You can't saunter past a place looking serreptitously out of the corner of your eye to see if it's the sort of place you want to go into. By the time you've entered an intimidating lobby, had a man welcome you into an elevator and press the requisite button for you and been shown to your seat in a deserted over-the-top bar you feel duty bound to have a drink there whether you like it or not. We therefore selected a recently designer-refurbished bar called the Rose Bar on the ground floor of the Delano Hotel, apparently the epicentre of Miami-cool for the moment.
The whole ground floor was enormous, with celings somewhere way above us hidden by enormous drapes that tumbled down the walls and in the space in between dividing the room into reception, a couple of restaurants, a sushi bar and the cocktail bar in the middle. We passed through this awe-inspring space, ummed and ahhed about whether to eat there and seeing the prices settled for a cocktail instead.
Just about every cocktail bar in the world now does a mojito. Miami claims (along with many other places) to be the home of the mojito, so I decided to order one in this rather impressive bar to see how good they can be. The answer? Sadly disappointing. The mint wasn't crushed, the rum nothing special, and a crazy amount of sugar crunched between my teeth after each sip. At this price I wasn't going to leave any, but we politely turned down a second one and left the Delano to the beautiful people and their well-dressed grandparents.
The Delano is at the north end of Ocean Drive, a road with a good name and many restaurants on it so we walkled that way. For a long time we saw no restaurants, but eventually they came thick and fast. This stretch seemed to have a lot of competition, and there were people outside each establishment vying for our trade with offers of free drinks, entertainment and so on. However we were put off by the unusual practice of putting examples of the dishes under celophane on display under the menus. I don't know how long they majority had been sitting there, but in the heat they just sweated and looked decidedly unappetising. In the end we went back to one of the first we'd seen.
They had a table available on the side of the street, but this seemed lacking in atmosphere, so we waited at the bar for one in a better location. We waited, and waited. Another couple joined us in our waiting. We tried catching the eye of the waiter without success. I checked with the person on the door without success. Eventually, about 45 mins later than we'd been told, and under the glare of the other couple we got our table. During that time we'd been able to study the menu in great detail, and discovered the restaurant to be owned by eighties perm legend Gloria Estefan and brat-packer Emilio Estevez. Well, they need to visit this non-jewel in their empire; the service was lousy and the food cold but at least a refusual to pay a service charge got the manager to ask why and the bill was reduced by 30% or so.
We wandered back to our hotel passing what were normal bars (i.e. not of the hotel variety) trying to gauge whether they looked interesting without looking interested, as that was sure to prompt some menu-waving employee into a sales-pitch. The pitch usually revolved around telling me there were dancing ladies, until they realised Esther was with me. It's true though, there were dancing ladies. Usually they were dancing on podiums, though at the more refined establishments they were in cages suspended above the dancefloor. All in all it was tacky strip of bars, so we headed back to the bar at the top of our hotel. And we then realised that we might as well not have left home, as it was by far the nicest place we'd been; open air, relaxing sofas, damn good frozen mojitos, a view over the beach, cooling breeze and funky neon tower behind the bar (see photo).
As we were soon to enter South America, where the US dollar is king of the currencies, we needed to change some of our travellers cheques for the real thing. On the way to the bank, we wandered through some of the more residential areas of Miami Beach. It's a surprisingly low-rise and down-to-earth neighbourhood, with most of the houses of the single-storey hacienda variety. Judging by the queue in the bank, most of the residents were there, but after a painfully long wait we got our greenbacks and headed off towards the shopping district. I hate walking around with large amounts of cash on me. People who at any other time you'd pass without a glance suddenly become potential muggers and it's impossible to relax.
We finally found the pedestrianized street we'd been looking for. I guess these are rare things in the US, and we wandered up and down looking at the shops but without any real enthousiasm until I saw something that is always likely to catch my eye, an Apple Store.
I don't quite understand why, but Apple products are addictive. The first one I owned was an iPod, and that led on to a Apple Mac laptop. There's something pleasing to use about them, and I find myself eyeing products I have no need for trying to justify to myself a reason to buy them, no matter how ridiculous. After admitting that lugging a new computer round South America would be silly, I eventually decided to purchase a very small gadget, but one of the most useful - an iPod photo connector. This little square of plastic allows us to transfer our photos from the digital camera to the iPod, thus allowing the camera to be cleared and more photos taken. Without it, there's no way we'd have been able to get round the world without spending even more time in internet cafes, burning lots CDs or buying lots of very expensive memory cards. So I heartily recommend this to all iPod-owning travellers. Just don't loose your iPod!
After a bite for lunch, we wandered back along Ocean Drive again, this time in the daylight. There's a nice boardwalk that meanders along by the beach, along which are showers to get rid of that pesky sand after a dip. These seem very popular with the local homeless community who were making good use of them both to wash themselves and their clothes. Maybe all towns should have them. Rather than the beach, we chilled by the rooftop pool, people-watching the ladies that lunch Miami-style (wearing bikinis they obviously wouldn't dream of getting wet).
It was a couple of days before Esther's birthday, so that evening we treated ourselves to a meal in the hotel restaurant, one that is meant to be very good according to reviews we'd seen. The food was pretty good, and the service not bad, but it wasn't quite the meal we'd hoped. It was one of those places where the manager wanders from table to table asking people if they were having a nice time, but everytime the guy wandered close to our table, he'd catch my eye and shuffle nervously off to another table. I've absolutely no idea why. I'm sure the English don't have a reputation for complaining about things.
Technically we only had two nights in Miami, but we didn't fly to Lima until after midnight so we had the whole of the next day to relax, and felt no guilt about just sitting by the pool. In fact I was quite productive typed up a few blog entries whilst sipping drinks and sunning myself. Yes, we had purchased a useful little gadget when in New England, a new Palm handheld together with keyboard. It was originally meant to be for internet browsing in all the wifi hotspots we found in the States, but is actually more useful for just typing up articles, writing emails and the like so you can quickly transfer them in an internet cafe rather than spend hours in a darkened room. Thank goodness for factor 30 suncream, because I'd have burned horribly that afternoon. As it was I'd just about caught the sun in a good way.
More due to lethargy than anything else, we had dinner in the hotel restuarant again. What a difference. A new waiter (apparently German, but sounding very American), a couple of glow-in-the-dark cocktails (courtesy of electric ice cubes), two much nicer dishes, the manager (a Frenchman) had lost his bashfulness and become chatty, and an impressive thunderstorm whipping up the tablecloths and causing palm branches to crash onto tables with glass smashing results, all made for a much more memorable meal.
Finally, after being given a number of the luminous ice cubes by the waiter, we waived goodbye to Miami and headed for the airport, little sleep and our next continent.
We arrived at the airport mid-morning, our flight from Montreal having left at 5am. We got a taxi into town along quiet avenues, the sun glinting off the large glass and white-painted hotels and giving the water a lovely deep blue colour. The roads crossed bridges over harbours dotted with gleaming yachts, and there was none of the grotty neighbourhoods you might expect to pass on a drive from an airport into a major city.
The taxi pulled up outside our hotel, and we were greeted by a smiling guy in white trousers and a casual patel coloured shirt who welcomed us to the hotel. Actually he welcomed us to The Hotel, as that was the name of the place we were staying. It's a small boutique-style place, and apparently the furnishings and decor were designed by Todd Oldham. I can't say I'd ever heard of Mr Oldham, but then I'm hardly a fashionista. The staff were probably some of the friendliest people I've ever met working in a hotel; chatty, smiling and very welcoming. Our room was decorated in white and pastel colours, lemon, green, blue which fitted the setting perfectly. We did the usual, opening cupboards, bouncing on the matress, playing with taps, examining the mini-bar then had a wander around the hotel. It was small by American standards, being only about five stories with a few rooms on each, but this part of Miami, South Beach, is quite low-rise and from the top of the hotel we could see the beach one block away. The top floor was divided into two, one half being an open-air bar similar to the one we'd visited in Puerto Rico, the other being a swimming pool and bar. Noting these for later use, we headed down for lunch in the restaurant. The food was elegant, well presented and in sensible sized portions, something of a welcome change for the States.After lunch we hit the shops. I was feeling a little bit scruffy surrounded by all this elegance, so hunted out a smartish-but-casual shirt that wouldn't look out of place in the restaurant. There was a surprisingly good selection of affordable shops amongst the Gucci, Armani and Tiffany emporia, and the streets around the hotel were mostly well-preserved art deco buildings. One or two streets away though and these got a bit run-down and rather more tacky - too much neon, a few too many burger joints and the like. So we headed back to the hotel, dumped the shopping and headed for the beach.
What a beach it is. Beautiful golden sand, a lovely aquamarine ocean and enough space to relax. Our hotel had a reserved bit of the beach, with padded sun loungers and umbrellas to shelter us from the strong sun. The sea was just the right temperature, cool enough to be refreshing, warm enough to be able to dive straight in (I'll never forget the experience of trying to cool down in the seas around Thailand and finding it considerably warmer than the air temperature). There were a few people around strutting their stuff and exhibiting their perfectly toned bodies, but it wasn't as intimidating as I expected and my pale untoned torso didn't attract the sniggers I'd feared. You might think this would be the place to get an all over tan, but I burn so easily that I spent most of the time hiding under the umbrella. Just as things cooled down enough to risk pulling the lounger from the shade, the attendant came over and made it quite clear that he wanted to leave, and therefore so should we.We walked back, swapped the towels for the smarter clothing, and headed off to find a little entertainment. Our guide had warned us that Miami doesn't really do bars in the usual sense. People either drank in restaurants, or in trendy hotel bars, often on the top floor of the building (just like in our hotetl in fact). The problem with this is that it's very hard to choose where to go. You can't saunter past a place looking serreptitously out of the corner of your eye to see if it's the sort of place you want to go into. By the time you've entered an intimidating lobby, had a man welcome you into an elevator and press the requisite button for you and been shown to your seat in a deserted over-the-top bar you feel duty bound to have a drink there whether you like it or not. We therefore selected a recently designer-refurbished bar called the Rose Bar on the ground floor of the Delano Hotel, apparently the epicentre of Miami-cool for the moment.
The whole ground floor was enormous, with celings somewhere way above us hidden by enormous drapes that tumbled down the walls and in the space in between dividing the room into reception, a couple of restaurants, a sushi bar and the cocktail bar in the middle. We passed through this awe-inspring space, ummed and ahhed about whether to eat there and seeing the prices settled for a cocktail instead.
Just about every cocktail bar in the world now does a mojito. Miami claims (along with many other places) to be the home of the mojito, so I decided to order one in this rather impressive bar to see how good they can be. The answer? Sadly disappointing. The mint wasn't crushed, the rum nothing special, and a crazy amount of sugar crunched between my teeth after each sip. At this price I wasn't going to leave any, but we politely turned down a second one and left the Delano to the beautiful people and their well-dressed grandparents.
The Delano is at the north end of Ocean Drive, a road with a good name and many restaurants on it so we walkled that way. For a long time we saw no restaurants, but eventually they came thick and fast. This stretch seemed to have a lot of competition, and there were people outside each establishment vying for our trade with offers of free drinks, entertainment and so on. However we were put off by the unusual practice of putting examples of the dishes under celophane on display under the menus. I don't know how long they majority had been sitting there, but in the heat they just sweated and looked decidedly unappetising. In the end we went back to one of the first we'd seen.
They had a table available on the side of the street, but this seemed lacking in atmosphere, so we waited at the bar for one in a better location. We waited, and waited. Another couple joined us in our waiting. We tried catching the eye of the waiter without success. I checked with the person on the door without success. Eventually, about 45 mins later than we'd been told, and under the glare of the other couple we got our table. During that time we'd been able to study the menu in great detail, and discovered the restaurant to be owned by eighties perm legend Gloria Estefan and brat-packer Emilio Estevez. Well, they need to visit this non-jewel in their empire; the service was lousy and the food cold but at least a refusual to pay a service charge got the manager to ask why and the bill was reduced by 30% or so.
We wandered back to our hotel passing what were normal bars (i.e. not of the hotel variety) trying to gauge whether they looked interesting without looking interested, as that was sure to prompt some menu-waving employee into a sales-pitch. The pitch usually revolved around telling me there were dancing ladies, until they realised Esther was with me. It's true though, there were dancing ladies. Usually they were dancing on podiums, though at the more refined establishments they were in cages suspended above the dancefloor. All in all it was tacky strip of bars, so we headed back to the bar at the top of our hotel. And we then realised that we might as well not have left home, as it was by far the nicest place we'd been; open air, relaxing sofas, damn good frozen mojitos, a view over the beach, cooling breeze and funky neon tower behind the bar (see photo).As we were soon to enter South America, where the US dollar is king of the currencies, we needed to change some of our travellers cheques for the real thing. On the way to the bank, we wandered through some of the more residential areas of Miami Beach. It's a surprisingly low-rise and down-to-earth neighbourhood, with most of the houses of the single-storey hacienda variety. Judging by the queue in the bank, most of the residents were there, but after a painfully long wait we got our greenbacks and headed off towards the shopping district. I hate walking around with large amounts of cash on me. People who at any other time you'd pass without a glance suddenly become potential muggers and it's impossible to relax.
We finally found the pedestrianized street we'd been looking for. I guess these are rare things in the US, and we wandered up and down looking at the shops but without any real enthousiasm until I saw something that is always likely to catch my eye, an Apple Store.
I don't quite understand why, but Apple products are addictive. The first one I owned was an iPod, and that led on to a Apple Mac laptop. There's something pleasing to use about them, and I find myself eyeing products I have no need for trying to justify to myself a reason to buy them, no matter how ridiculous. After admitting that lugging a new computer round South America would be silly, I eventually decided to purchase a very small gadget, but one of the most useful - an iPod photo connector. This little square of plastic allows us to transfer our photos from the digital camera to the iPod, thus allowing the camera to be cleared and more photos taken. Without it, there's no way we'd have been able to get round the world without spending even more time in internet cafes, burning lots CDs or buying lots of very expensive memory cards. So I heartily recommend this to all iPod-owning travellers. Just don't loose your iPod!
After a bite for lunch, we wandered back along Ocean Drive again, this time in the daylight. There's a nice boardwalk that meanders along by the beach, along which are showers to get rid of that pesky sand after a dip. These seem very popular with the local homeless community who were making good use of them both to wash themselves and their clothes. Maybe all towns should have them. Rather than the beach, we chilled by the rooftop pool, people-watching the ladies that lunch Miami-style (wearing bikinis they obviously wouldn't dream of getting wet).
It was a couple of days before Esther's birthday, so that evening we treated ourselves to a meal in the hotel restaurant, one that is meant to be very good according to reviews we'd seen. The food was pretty good, and the service not bad, but it wasn't quite the meal we'd hoped. It was one of those places where the manager wanders from table to table asking people if they were having a nice time, but everytime the guy wandered close to our table, he'd catch my eye and shuffle nervously off to another table. I've absolutely no idea why. I'm sure the English don't have a reputation for complaining about things.
Technically we only had two nights in Miami, but we didn't fly to Lima until after midnight so we had the whole of the next day to relax, and felt no guilt about just sitting by the pool. In fact I was quite productive typed up a few blog entries whilst sipping drinks and sunning myself. Yes, we had purchased a useful little gadget when in New England, a new Palm handheld together with keyboard. It was originally meant to be for internet browsing in all the wifi hotspots we found in the States, but is actually more useful for just typing up articles, writing emails and the like so you can quickly transfer them in an internet cafe rather than spend hours in a darkened room. Thank goodness for factor 30 suncream, because I'd have burned horribly that afternoon. As it was I'd just about caught the sun in a good way.
More due to lethargy than anything else, we had dinner in the hotel restuarant again. What a difference. A new waiter (apparently German, but sounding very American), a couple of glow-in-the-dark cocktails (courtesy of electric ice cubes), two much nicer dishes, the manager (a Frenchman) had lost his bashfulness and become chatty, and an impressive thunderstorm whipping up the tablecloths and causing palm branches to crash onto tables with glass smashing results, all made for a much more memorable meal.
Finally, after being given a number of the luminous ice cubes by the waiter, we waived goodbye to Miami and headed for the airport, little sleep and our next continent.
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