Florida - Miami

Firstly I want to thank our lovely neighbours at home who gave us an 'experience' voucher (like Red Balloon) as a farewell gift. We decided to use it in Miami and we thoroughly enjoyed our time here thanks to the tours we bought with the voucher. 

We arrived late to the hotel in Miami around 10pm, exhausted after the very long day and drive from the Kennedy Space Centre. We were up early for our first tour. We took Uber to the tour meeting point but arrived to some deserted streets in the back of nowhere? Ooops, Deb had got the address slightly wrong - she had a NW (north west) in the address which changes the location considerably. Thank god we didn't get out of the car and wander around. Quick redirect, Uber gets us to the right location. We took a vintage car tour of Miami, the beach area and Wynwood. 

The driver was a lady and she gave us a good overview of the car. I found the whole experience quite cool - two chicks riding a vintage car with a lady driving us around. The car was a 1960 Ford Sunliner. It was a solid beast, squeaked in the suspension and had a big steering wheel to help turn the very average power steering. She started the engine and it just rumbled - it was bloody awesome. I was grinning in the back seat and chuckling inside. 

Holy hot wheels Batman

Batman couldn't resist taking a seat in the front. It was very similar to the bat mobile with it's long length and sharp deep corners. I desperately wanted to jump over the door and into the front seat like Batman does into the bat mobile  Batman will speak to Alfred about getting the bat mobile out for tours of Gotham - the flame out back would give that extra boost for tourists !! The tour was 2 hours and lots of people looked, waved and took photos. We saw many of the Miami areas, the art deco architecture, the beach, the Wynwood art district. Miami is not what I expected at all - it has an old look to it because of the art deco look and they retain that look on all new developments. I was expecting a Gold Coast look and feel but this was not the case. There were some very different areas and they have been developed and improved over the years. The Wynwood area is an art district. The buildings have artwork drawn on them and cafes are popping up to draw more people to the area. We covered so much ground and learnt a great deal from this tour. Our driver was excellent, so knowledgeable and I can thoroughly recommend this tour. 

 

We took a walking food tour through Little Havana in the afternoon. Little Havana is a neighbourhood of Miami and home to many Cuban immigrant residents, as well as many residents from Central and South America. Little Havana is named after Havana, the capital and largest city in Cuba. Little Havana is noted as a center of social, cultural, and political activity in Miami. It is the best known neighborhood for Cuban exiles in the world. It is characterised by its street life, with restaurants, music and other cultural activities, mom and pop enterprises, political passion, and great warmth amongst its residents. We only just discovered that US residents can now travel to Cuba as many of the hotel customers were flying there. It's quite exciting to see Cuba opening up - it would be a great place to see one day.

We had a little bite to eat before the tour and I wanted to try the coffee. Deb was up for a bravery challenge too so we both ordered expresso's with a cup of milk on the side. Holy hot shots, it was strong, REALLY strong. We added sugar and sipped away at it. The little cup held about 3 shots of expresso. We eventually poured it into the cup of milk and it was beautiful. This was indeed the best coffee I've had since being in the US. Now Deb's not a huge coffee drinker so you could imagine how 'pinged and wired' Deb was after drinking 3 shots of that black fuel !! She was a new girl. 

The walking tour took us along Calle Ocho, or Eighth Street, which is the unofficial capital of Miami's Cuban community. Known for its food and restaurants, Cuban coffee windows (or ventanitas), cigar shops, music and cultural activities, Calle Ocho is the main artery of Little Havana.

The walking tour was excellent. The people on tour were funny and chatty and we ate lots of things along the way - empanada, cuban sandwich, cuban sweet and savoury pastries, more cuban coffee, ice cream and sugar cane juice. We learnt that cuban coffee is much stronger than Italian coffee so that's why it tasted pretty rough on the tongue - I think I have hair on my tongue now from drinking it. They drink coffee like the Italian's - buy it from a window, chat to strangers and go back to work. They don't usually sit down and chat socially like we do over our milky cappacino's and lattes. 

Gotta get me one of those hats.

Rooster'ing around.

Another coffee shot

So what's the roosters all about??  From what I understood, every place has its icon. Well roosters seem to roam 'everywhere' in Cuba and here so someone as a joke decided the rooster should be an icon. And it stuck. They are everywhere and really colourful. 

One of the real highlights was visiting a cuban cigar 'factory' It was a small shop (don't let the word factory mislead you) that has won world famous recognition (like an Oscar) for rolling great cigars. The pictures below show Don Pedro Bello who owns the Bello Family's Cuba Tobacco Trading Co (1528). Since 1886, five generations have been involved in the Cuban tobacco industry. The tobacco is Cuban seed grown in the Dominican Republic and hand made by Cuban master rollers. Mr. Don was sitting there, waving as we took photos - he was a total ROCKSTAR !! I did have flashbacks to the old 80s movie 'Weekend at Bernies' but Mr. Don was very much alive.  I was fascinated watching the cigar rollers - the shop didn't stink too bad of cigar smell but I just relished knowing that I was seeing something special and legendary.  

The tour continued and the next stop was the Domino Park. Story goes that it started 'in the day' when men (older men) would wait there under the big shady trees while their wives and children would be in the cinema next door. They played domino's but they play 9's, not 6's. Today it is busy with older people, mostly men, playing domino's. They have a council member running a little booth inside the area. The rules include no gambling and you must be over 55 (but they're not totally strict on that bit). I watched in awe as this was serious business. The banging down of those domino's and the shuffling for a new game. They were not phased or distracted by our sticky beeking or photos. There were at least two walking sticks per table and I reckon there were about 100 people there. 

It was a hot day walking around, quite humid but great to be in this climate. One of the cool stops was this famous bar and lounge called Ball and Chain. It's been closed and shuttered up for 60 years but it was re-opened last year. It has live entertainment and a great open bar atmosphere. It has a fabulous history of entertainers. Here, we were treated to Majitos. God it was good, cold, refreshing and tangy.

As the tour came to a close, we stopped by a local fruit and veg shop. There is a fruit here called 'plantains'. A plantain, is one of the less sweet cultivated varieties of the genus Musa whose fruit is also known as banana. Plantains are always eaten cooked, sometimes along with their leaves and fibers, and are usually large, angular and starchy, in contrast to common or "dessert" bananas, which are typically eaten raw and without the peel, usually being smaller, more rounded and sugary; however, there is no formal scientific distinction between plantains and bananas. After removing the skin, the unripe fruit can be sliced and deep fried in hot oil to produce chips. We never got to try the chips but we saw the plantains in the fruit shop. What a bloody rude shock you'd get if you bit one of those if you thought it was a banana !!

I also tasted/drank cane sugar juice. Being a North Qld'er, I'm very used to seeing cane sugar farms but I've never tasted cane sugar raw. So this was a first. It was sweet but not overly. I couldn't drink much of it but it was nice with ice.

 

We totally enjoyed the walking food tour - again, we learnt/saw/ate and did a lot of great things. Again, I would highly recommend this tour.

To finish on a funny, here are some signs I snapped along our travels. If you can't read the sign on the bottom, it says FUDD-RUCKERS - it's a chain of burger joint we saw in the airport. 

Not sure I'd want to buy something here?