Epic Journey Log Entry #4 -----Miami, South Miami Beach, West Palm Beach, West Palm

Epic Journey Log Entry #4
Miami, South Miami Beach, West Palm Beach, West Palm

After the Hollywood Boardwalk experience (which was also my first beach boardwalk experience and the first time I ate a Turkish doner kabob since my Spain days!), Julio and I set out for Miami the next day.

People who know me, know that I love other cultures with a passion – I really must have had past lives in every single country because even I don’t quite understand where my love of submerging myself in other cultures come from.

In particular, partly thanks to my BGSU ‘familia’ and years in the Latino Student Union, I love Latina cultura more than any other. It’s not any one thing, really, but more so a combination of my love for la musica, dance, language, and people.

Henceforth, our first stop – after a yummy ham & eggs breakfast that Julio made (I never put ham in my eggs before and now I love it!) – was CALLE OCHO which is the main drag of Little Havana in Miami. Ay de mi, it was great.

First we went to a fruit stand that made smoothies from FRESH FRUIT. En serio, I will never enjoy a standardized smoothie with just lame-o fruit juice EVER again. I had a mango smoothie and, ay!, you could taste the real fruit. Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. Plus, it was only $3 for a large amount! Try finding that at a mall food court!

There was an great mini-park that had an ancient tree with roots that were raised out of the great and encircled a large area in a convoluted way that created great resting places. It was here that we drank our smoothies and observed the surroundings…which included chickens and baby chicks walkin’ around like they owned the place.

And no, I’m not kidding.

But you know what was weirder than the chickens running around? We found a small ANIMAL SKULL and various BONES in the dirt surrounding the tree.

…yeah…I have *no* explanation for that! Very creepy!

It really felt like another world there but soon we began continuing our adventures. We drove to South Beach where I saw the Atlantic Ocean under bright sunshine for the first time! Gorgeous, simply gorgeous. We took some pictures on the beach and walked barefoot for a while. Amazingly, since tourist season was over, the beach wasn’t crowded at all,

Then we walked around for a bit and hydrated ourselves at a Burger King. Now, mind you, we got some delicious caffeinated beverages, but I was surprised to see that this particular Burger King, 2 blocks from the beach, served beer! It was fairly amusing :)

Then something not so good happened…my purse strap broke! I had bought the purse at Wal-Mart specifically for this trip because it had a zipper and was long enough to wear over my shoulder (aka it prevents purse-snatching and pick-pocketing better than most). I mean, YES, Wal-Mart is the devil and you can’t trust anything from there but I never expected it to break on my 2nd day of wearing it!! And it’s not like I snatched a sea turtle from the beach and stuffed it in there! Grr, it was very frustrating.

From there we went to West Palm Beach’s outdoor mall to meet with one of my friend’s that I hadn’t seen in over a year – Stephanie. We met through a community organizing training and she is seriously only of the sweetest and funnest people I know so I was thrilled to see her again. We ate lunch at the B.B. King restaurant where I had a delicious pulled pork sandwich (one of my recent favorite things!) and Steph and I caught up. Also, it was cool that I had lunch with both Julio and Stephanie because they had never met (both fairly recently moved to the area) so they got to make friends! I was pretty happy with that – I love it when my friends befriend each other!

Wanting to see some more of South Florida, Stephanie drove us through West Palm Beach to Palm Beach. Yes, there is a distinction. PB is where the uppity millionaires live – and unfortunately has a dark past. Steph is a community organizer in the area and was told (plus, she later verified this) that the almost-patron-saint of Florida (name escapes me) enacted cruel policies to form the neighborhoods of the area. In the 1800s PB was an African-American neighborhood but he saw it as the perfect location for high-scale real estate. Once he realized that no one was moving, he invited all the folks in the area to a party at his estate.

Sounds pretty nice, huh?

…Nope.

While everyone was gone the neighborhood was razed to the ground thanks to arsonists.

I’m not sure of the further details, but I plan on googling them at some point.

Besides its dark history, PB was beautiful location and the three of us had a photo shoot (inspired by a rather unattractive and vapid Floridian male who was posing on the beach). After that we went back to WPB and stopped by a Cuban place that Stephanie enjoys to have another mango smoothie (really, I’m kind of obsessed now!) and I got a rellena de papa, which is fried dough with seasoned meat inside. It’s a fritura and popular in Cuban/Puerto Rican culture – and something that I am also obsessed with! It always pains my heart that NW Ohio has a decent-sized Mexican population but not enough folks from the Caribbean to run a store to sell me delicious frituras!

After our tasty treats, we went out separate ways and Julio took me back to his casa. Since he had to leave for Orlando that night for work, he was kind enough to leave me his key so I could take a taxi 3-miles to the Tri-Rail and then the Tri-Rail would take me to the airport..

Honestly, once we were all done I could not believe that I had experienced so much of south Florida in such a short span of time – 24 hours! Julio was the BEST host a person could ever have – incredibly thoughtful and giving, he really made my time there absolutely wonderful. I’m incredibly thankful that he hosted me