Hello from Miami!
Miami is about cars. Ocean Drive is the hotspot place to be seen in Miami South Beach, especially if you have a car, sorry a CAR. If you're a dude with a dude car in Miami you need to park it in Ocean Drive outside the most popular restaurants. In fact if you have a very very special car like an old-style Cadillac with leather upholstery, open-top and wheels the size of the London Eye, owners of restaurants actually employ guys to flag them down and offer them a valet parking slot as a way of attracting customers. The coolest dude of all sits the whole evening in his black Buick outside one of the most favoured eating-places with a hat perched nonchalantly on his head, bending forward as if he's preparing at any moment to climb out and acknowledge the admirers. But the dude turns out to be a wax dummy. How cool is that?
The fanciest parking spot of all is outside Brown's Hotel up one end of Ocean Drive which is always massively crowded with diners and onlookers. Me included. First night, the following cars were parked all together - and all of them shining white. It was definitely white car night, because the following night similar cars were all black. Anyway on this night, one side of the street were a Lamborgini and an Aston Martin, not Lamborgini or Aston Martin like you might recognise in the King's Road, Chelsea, but custom-built and seemingly impossible to climb into they were so low down and groovy and tight-fitting. You needed snake-hips, a bendy back, slim bottom and dainty feet. Perhaps the owners were also wax models. I never saw anyone ease his way into the driver's seats. Across the road, right outside Brown's was a Maserati and a chunky chunky smack-in-the-face, powerhouse Rolls Royce with a chrome front grill the size of Buckingham Palace gates. Grrrrrrrrr!!! You couldn't take your eyes off the cars. Four owners were presumably inside Brown's stuffing themselves with steaks as big as bullocks. Further down the road was a very red sports car with gull-wing doors, both up as far as they could go like a seagull coming into land. This fancy job DID have an owner, well a serious dude with regulation snake hips was calmly sitting sideways in the passenger seat with his feet perched on the pavement. Gold earings in each ear and a smile that was saying," Dis my car, man, bet you ain't gotta a car like dis, dis my car, man." He had a body as thin as straw and trousers (pants in the US of A) that were fashionably slipped well below the posterior. Not a fashion I have taken to I admit, but this guy was seriously cool and could be forgiven.
On one night, four huge, low-slung Cadillacs, all in immaculate condition and with the front wheels bigger than the rear wheels, so giving the impression of a car about to take off, cruised back and forth down Ocean Drive. One of them was mauve, or "mov" as the Americans say. You have to be a pretty special dude to go into a showroom and say: "Hey. man, I wanna Cadillac and I want it in mov". The four Cads spent the whole evening roaring up and down, keeping close together. Restaurant valet parking employees tried their best to persuade them to come alongside their eateries but there was no way you could park four 18ft-long Cads outside without ordering customers with lesser cars to get the hell out of there. So they kept cruising! But dudes with cars like that don't ever park, they just step on the gas.
For those not interested in cars, sorry about the above adulation, but being the owner of a pretty cool classic WHITE 1984 Jaguar Sovereign I think I'm entitled to a little bit of drooling.
Apart from cars, Miami is full of very loud Cubans, especially on the beach, where they gather in large numbers, the men wearing gold necklaces with crosses, flash sunglasses and baseball caps, and the women in skimpy bikinis which reveal 99 per cent of their bottoms. They walk around like strutting peakcocks while their men talk, sorry, shout, all at the same time. For us more modest Brits, it's a strain on the ears and on the eyes!!
After five days in Miami I can now watch CSI Miami, my favourite TV show, with a smile on my face....cars, cocktails and cool cool, well everything.
