Stormy Monday Blues

    What do you think? Too blue? It seems really, really blue to me, particularly on the laptop at work. Annie's voted - she likes it. The Cat likes it, and says it's blue but not too much like J.R.'s. (I noticed that they're similar when I popped from mine to hers.) I needed a change, you see; I'd grown weary of the gray. Is it too monochromatic? I'm curious to know what it looks like in to those who aren't creating it.
    The last day of the Miami trip, long overdue.

Saturday, 17 April 2004

    We hadn't made any plans the day before, but we had a vague idea that we wanted to see Villa Vizcaya and the area south of where we were staying. The problem was that it wasn't within walking distance, we were tired of paying for cabs, I was sunburned to within an inch of my life and T was also pretty red, my blisters were handled with the Band-Aid things but I still didn't want to make them worse, and we were just tired. We'd also been drinking every night and that was sucking the life out of us to some extent - alcohol and hot weather meant we were dehydrated a lot of the time even with all the water we were drinking. So we woke up late again on Saturday morning. Ate breakfast at the Starbucks cart in the hotel lobby again, like little sheep. I had a fabulous croissant and orange juice; T had a muffin and milk. Afterward, we sat and talked for a while, contemplating getting a cab and doing things, but eventually decided that we just didn't want to. We grabbed our books and a couple of bottles of water and headed out onto the Riverwalk. We watched the river go by and read until it became uncomfortable to be sitting on the cement, and then we headed to the pool. I couldn't sit in full sun because I'd have burned to a crisp so I was in shade down to my waist with my legs in the sun. They glowed as if I had no color at all. T was almost all in the sun. We read out there for several hours. Lunch from Starbucks - in the lobby - was a shared chicken Caesar salad and a bottle of Coke. Wonderful, just right. We just lounged around through the whole day. The pool was good for people-watching. There was a girl (20-years-old?) in a bikini who was good for our body-image, because she had to outweigh either of us by a good 30 lb. but she was completely unphased by that fact; she stalked around the pool yammering on her cell phone as if she was the only person in attendance. There were two British med students there, too. Guys. One was really good-looking, the other one not so much but the fact that he was (1) sitting by the pool of a hotel in Miami, (2) in April, (3) wearing a reasonably attractive swimsuit, (4) reading a good book, (5) while British, made up for anything he might've been lacking in the looks department. Yum.
    OK, moving on.
    Dinner was something special. We met up with friends and took the MetroMover, which is a free, automated sort of trolley-thing on a track that goes around the downtown Miami area. We went to the Bayside Marketplace, to Bongos, which is an authentic Cuban restaurant owned by the Estefan family (i.e. Gloria Estefan). It took forever to get there after we got off the MetroMover because it's located behind the American Airlines Arena (where the Miami Heat [of the NBA] play) and the arena is huge, and yes, we walked the wrong way around. But it was worth the walk because the food was amazing. I wasn't drinking, again because of a headache, so I ordered the funkiest thing I could find that wasn't alcohol: Iron Beer. It turned out to be like Root Beer, sort of. Well, more like Cream soda with spices, really. An acquired taste, I'd say. But my actual food was great - Vaca Frita. Pieces of tender pork, marinated with garlic and onions. Black beans, rice and sweet plantains on the side. I'm not going to lie and say that plantains are now my favorite food, but I did eat them and appreciate them. Apparently the sweet plantains were vastly superior to the fried ones that a friend ordered. I had a lovely, mellow rice pudding for dessert.
    Bongos is a huge restaurant with amazing vaulted ceilings. The bar stools are functional bongo drums. After 11:00, they push the standard tables off the floor and the place turns into a dance club. I'd have liked to have seen - but not heard - that. It was well loud enough while we ate. And for no apparent reason, the same song played over and over and over while we were there, literally dozens of times. One of our friends asked about it when we left and the wait-staff just rolled their eyes. "Yeah, it's enough to drive you crazy!" The management claimed that the CD player was on repeat, but judging by the waiters' response, that wasn't quite true.
    Again, back to the hotel, back to the bar. To bed fairly early, because our flight was scheduled for 10:45 AM.