Bienvenidos a Miami

When it´s hot smells are stronger. And it´s hot in Miami. Good and bad smells are amplified by temperature. We are on a 5 day vacation in this city which among other things is the undeclared capital of Latin America. English is barely spoken here.

We are here with Nina my fiancee and the two boys, Tom and Leo. We are staying at a huge hotel called the Fontainebleau. It is the ultimate Miami hotel. Only its renovation it´s supposed to have cost a $1bn and they brag about it. Kids love it. Nina seems to enjoy it as well. I alternate. I don´t usually go to hotels and this is the mother of all hotels. It´s gigantic. Crowded. But some of the restaurants, especially Hakkasan are world class.

Here are some random thoughts about Miami. It is hardly an intellectual place yet it seems to be populated with visitors who want to get away from highly intellectual places, for example NYC. It is fashionable when it wants to be but it is also one of the cheesiest places on earth. Sometimes the changes from fashion to horror happen in seconds. The forecast these days is incredibly monotonous and yet the weather changes all the time. People say it´s unbearably hot. I instead think that what is unbearable is how cold every place is. Americans don´t seem to want to manage the weather, they want to defeat it. Miamia is probably the city in USA with the most empty homes at any one time. Especially now in the summer, the low season. Many more people want to have a home here than live here. Spain where I live has a similar problem.

Here are some pictures. I especially liked the beach architecture, the art deco. But I was surprised at the mix of not so much the old and the new, but the fancy and the abandoned. From South Beach to the Fontainebleau, a walk I did this morning I saw the simplest Days Inn type hotels next to amazing new developments like Satay, the W, and others. One plus, the water is amazingly clean for being a major city.

Pictures were taking with my favorite small camera a Canon G10.