Three days in Miami, Florida

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It's day before Christmas eve; 8 o'clock in the morning. I (Johanna) have been awake already for more than an hour, even though we didn't go to bed until 2AM last night. I thought I had started to get over my jet lag as yesterday I managed to sleep until 7.30 (having woken up well before 6 on the first two mornings), but apparently that is not the case. Leo of course is fully accustomed to the time zone since he has been in US for more than a month now.

We have been in Miami now for three days. We are staying at South Beach, Washington Avenue. The first two days Leo was still working remotely, so I was looking around the town mostly on my own during the days. I ended up spending most of the time on Lincoln Road Mall, which is the main shopping street on Miami South Beach. Lincoln Road is an ok place for shopping, but the prices don't seem as tempting as I thought they would after hearing all about cheap and great shopping in Pennsylvania. General feeling of the Lincoln Road mall now is that probably it is the most expensive shopping place we will come across during this trip. From Finnish point of view prices were still ok, though, and I ended up making some purchases at Banana Republic and Guess :-) The area itself was to some extent fancy with fountains, flowers and palm trees lining up the street, creating a bit "plastic" general feel, which applies also to other parts of South Beach. It doesn't seem like a real town, but rather like a big tourist beach resort...which it of course to large extent is.

Anyway, we have seen more than shops here too. I visited the South Florida Art Center, which is located on the Lincoln Road. It's a building housing many small artist studios, and visitors can walk around looking at them. I was the only visitor at the time, and the place seemed quiet. Most of the studios have front walls of glass, so one can fully see what's going on in them, and see the artworks. I only saw one artist at work, though.

We also visited the Wolfsonian museum. For some reason, I was expecting to see there information and background regarding the South Beach art deco architecture, and was slightly disappointed to find exhibitions about design objects from 20th century, old Austrian post cards, and leftist propaganda posters. Nothing wrong with those exhibitions though, I did like the posters and post cards, and Leo found the museum interesting and meeting all expectations 😊 So, probably it's worth a visit.

Yesterday was Leo's first official holiday, and we started the day by eating for the second time at Juice & Java (on Washington avenue). They have all kinds of organic dishes from pasta to black bean soup, as well as super healthy juices (ingredients such as celery and carrots). Leo hadn't seen the beach yet in full daylight, so that's where we headed first. The beach is really nice, light grey sand and turquoise color ocean with decent waves. However, with temperature perhaps 20 degrees and chilly winds, we were not at all tempted to go in the water. It is anyway nice to walk around the beach. Next we took a small art deco walking tour on our own, following our guidebook. They have plenty of guided art deco tours here too, but we didn't have that much time to use. It was anyway good to spend a bit time really looking at the highlighted buildings and reading about them - that somehow opened our eyes to see that actually there is interesting architecture and history also on South Beach, even though on the first glance it seems more like a resort made for tourists.

Next destination was Downtown Miami (bus C from Washington Avenue). We wanted to see what Miami is like outside South Beach. On the way when the bus crossed the water, we saw some great mansions on islands with private (very expensive looking) boats docked on private piers. Downtown itself consisted mostly of sky scrapers with offices, there were some shops, restaurants and bars, but not much. We did go to Macy's to buy me sun glasses. We planned to walk around Biscayne boulevard where some downtown sights are located, but our preceding walk to Little Havana took so much time that it started to get dark by the time we made it back to our bus stop downtown that we didn't really have time anymore to see the boulevard. Little Havana is a Cuban area next to downtown. It's more like one, or few, streets with Cuban restaurants and shops run by Cubans (and other Latins). Everyone seemed to speak Spanish there, and we saw an old man dancing salsa on the street...definitely atmosphere was totally different compared to South Beach. It was a good walk also because we saw some "normal" Miami neighborhoods on the way, with houses looking like normal people live there...visiting only South Beach will leave the general image of Miami more glamorous. We had a Cuban lunch, which was very good. It was fish, rice, fried banana and "Cuban style" beer.

By the time we made it back to the downtown bus stop, it was cold and dark and we were feeling tired..so, we had to rely on our traditional remedy again..grande americano from Starbucks. It actually crossed my mind that we should probably stop this and start using local small businesses instead, but, it just works..you always know you can get big and good coffee by this order. Anyway, last activity for Miami was dinner with Danika and Christian. Christian is Leo's colleague in Pennsylvania, and they are also spending their xmas vacation in Florida. We had a nice evening eating at an Italian restaurant and ending the night with few drinks in few different bars.

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