Does anyone speak English in America?

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So we are now in Miami - having taken a 4 hour flight from Las Vegas over to South Florida.

Although we had to be at the airport for just after 5am, our flight was great, and I got a window seat and was able to see all of the Strip, Mojave Desert and the Grand Canyon as we headed east. The sun came up over the Grand Canyon as we flew, and it was a really fitting end to our trip to the region.

Coming into Florida I could see the expanse of the Everglades below us - the few roads in the area look like the paths of arrows slicing through the waterways - they are absolutely dead straight as far as the eye can see.

Our first impressions of Miami were tainted by the immense hassle we have had with accomodation. It is currently Spring Break in the USA - which means every minted kid in the States comes to Florida with Mummy and Daddy´s credit card and spends a fortune getting rat arsed for a fortnight. Even the Travelodges and other cheap 1*and 2* motels were charging up to 300GBP a night! It was ridiculous! Hostels get booked at least a year in advance so that wasn´t even a consideration unfortunately. In the end we paid a fortune for 2 nights accomodation at a rubbish motel near the airport and were happy to have a roof over our heads in the end for under 200 quid.

Continuing our frustrations with the USA though - no one here speaks English! It is all Spanish, Portugese, Haitian and Chinese. We went into no end of shops, restuarants and cafe´s and no one could understand a word we said. I wasn´t even using my finest Northern vernacular. We even went into cafe´s with English menu´s, pointing at what we wanted, and found the staff didn´t have a clue what their own menu said because it was in English!

Also UK Visa Cards don´t seem to work very often - 75% of the time they come back with error´s online or at EFTPOS systems in shops telling us that they can´t connect to the bank in the UK to verify our cards. Seems HSBC is only a local bank - they are utterly useless as a global bank as we have found many times on our travels.

Nonetheless we had 3 interesting days in Miami, touring the Art Deco districts in South Beach - Ocean Drive and Collins Avenue, as well as the cool Lincoln Road shopping area, where there were further cool examples of Art Deco theatres, cinemas and hotels.´

We also had a wander round a couple of the shopping malls - mainly to buy presents for the next leg of our RTW trip, albeit everything we thought of ended up being either too big to carry, breakable or just wouldn´t get through the overzealous custom´s regulations that seem to currently exist at airports in the US.

Our final night in Miami ended up being a crazy one. I fluked finding a shop with 2 tickets for the Miami Heat Basketball team. We got the tickets at 6.30 and tip off was 7.30! We therefore had to race round in our car to the American Airlines Arena to catch the game. It was brilliant though - albeit as is typical with American sports they managed to turn a 48 minute game into a 3 and half hour evening with the amount of breaks, time outs and delays! The half time entertainment - trampoline dunking cheerleaders and dancers broke one of the hoops, and it had to be replaced - much to the annoyance of the TV schedulers on ESPN I suspect!

I managed to get court side before the game as well, and if only I could have grabbed a ball I´d love to have had a crack at dunking one up against big old Shaq!

Miami was an interesting city. It has huge problems I suspect with racial and class segregation. It is a very trendy city to live in at the moment in the USA - but the financial divide between the wealthy few who live in the South Beach and Miami Beach area, and those that live in the main inner city area´s is huge - some of the streets we drove through both during the daytime and at night seemed pretty harsh places to live!

Dan

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Photos

Dan´s dirty dawg
This is how to properly eat a hot dog - Chilli, Cheese, Mustard, relish, Onions, Ketchup.....

Downtown Miami
Miami seems to be one big construction site at the moment - the amount of building and renovation underway is unbelievable!