Took the shuttle to the hotel, which is awesome. It’s the Embassy Suites, and our room has a separated living/kitchenette area, huge (bigger than the one at home!) flat panel tvs in both the living room and the bedroom. The rooms are all centered aroung a big atrium area with an open hallway outside the doors, it’s pretty neat. I told mom that it’s probably the nicest hotel I’ve ever stayed in in my adult-ish life. We get free breakfast and two hours of free drinks at the bar downstairs every day. Everything is decorated in a modern dark wood and silver theme with olive and peach and it’s all very Mexicali-tropical-art-deco. It’s weird, elegant, fun, and I like it! There’s a rooster that lives at the car rental place across the street. You heard me right. There are so many yellow cars here that Colin would be having a heyday with his yellow car game. Everybody drives Lamborghinis, Mercedes, and BMWs here. My old car would be the laughing stock of Miami.
After lunch in the hotel restaurant, where the waiter (who was probably the manager, too) was not very friendly, and obviously hated his job, we decided what to do for the rest of the day. After trying to get internet on my laptop, which apparently costs $12.95 a day (RAPE!) we were using our iphones to do Miami-stuff research. We wanted to shop, and all of the malls in Miami have really bad reviews online, except for what they call the Lincoln Road Mall, which is basically like State Street in Madison, only a lot nicer and classier. Every city usually has one of these streets where cars can’t drive. In Denver it was the 16th street mall (I think that’s right). Our choices of transportation were a $2, 1.5hour bus ride, or a $30 cab ride… So off we went, in our $30 cab ride, to the Lincoln Road Mall, which is in Miami Beach/South Beach. It was really nice!! Things that we noticed were that about 75% of the dogs people had were all wearing clothes, including a pack of about 10 miniature greyhounds, all being led by two people!! Every other store was clothes, eyewear, clothes, swimsuits, eyewear, jewelry, clothes… and 2 restaurants between every 3 stores. We went into a beachy swimwear/clothes store, as I was looking to buy a swimsuit coverup and Dan some new shorts, and I found this awesome black and white paisley silk scarf sundress/coverup thing. I’m sure you’ll see pictures of me in it somewhere in this blog J Walked all the way to the end (it seems to be about as long, or maybe a little shorter than State Street) and came back up, and Dan bought some new shorts at the Quicksilver store. Then we decided to try to find Miami Ink -- which is now called Love Hate, and they have a tattoo parlor, a retail store, AND a bar, all on the same street—Washington Ave. So down we walked, coming to the tattoo parlor first, made a donation in the “photo jar” and took some pics, and on to the retail store a few doors down to buy some stickers, and asked the guy about the bar, and if it’s insanely expensive—to which he answered *shrug* “it’s about the same as any other bar,” So we hoofed it another mile or so down Washington, encountered a “local” who called himself Twilight, (who was hitting on me while Dan was inside a store, I didn’t go in because I had an iced tea from Starbucks) and a Vietnamese man yelled at me “it’s too cold to be drinking iced tea” and eventually we made out of the sex-shop-sushi-shop-waxing-and-tattoo-parlor area (there’s an erotic art museum and a restaurant called “Sum Yum Gai,” I shit you not) into the *really* fancy area with restaurants that have extremely grand entrances and art-deco condos that you can bet cost more a month to rent than I make in 6 months… to the Love Hate lounge. Which was closed. Until 9. It was 7. Shit.
However! There is a little local bus that toodles around South Beach for only 25cents! So we hopped that back up to the Lincoln Road Mall and looked at the menu to a place that we thought the outside furniture was really awesome, however, no vegetarian options and $35 a piece, we kept on going. Down to an Italian place called Rosinella, where we BOTH ate (and ate well, outside at little mosaic tile tables in brown wicker chairs under a white canopy with candlelight!) for about $35! (Because we didn’t order any of their $10 drinks.) It got down to about 61 by this point, and I was getting cold! Time to go warm up at the bar. So back to the 25cent bus (what a find!) to ride it all the way around the loop back down to the bottom of Washington Street again, where we caught it before. Well, it doesn’t make a loop. “This is the last stop,” the driver said in my favorite African accent, and when we told him we thought it went all the way around, he told us to wait at the bus stop on the other corner and he’d come back around in about 15 minutes. So we sat and people-watched: the most interesting person was a cat lady coming out of the grocery store (build into the bottom of a skyscraper) that the bus stop was in front of, who actually had a cat in a cat carrier in her cart, which also had a gigantic bag of cat food in it. I don’t know what happened, but suddenly there was a cat in the driveway near where we were sitting, who was heading right for the road. Yes, the cat got hit by a car. Right in front of us. But don’t worry, he’s OK. He went under the car, thrashed around a bit, and tore off to the other side of the road. Meanwhile I am fighting back tears and vomit and exploding in general, we see the cat in the flowers at more expensive condos (these ones had a gate with an attendee and everything) across the street, and he seems to be limping, but fine. Then another few minutes later, he was walking down the sidewalk, slowly, but normally. The cat lady-- who mysteriously came out of the same driveway that the poor cat had emerged from just a few moments later-- rode the bus with us, while I fought the urge to accuse her of setting that cat free to get run over in the F*#%ING road. Theories rumbled around in my head about her cat-collecting ways and what, does she set one free every time she comes to buy cat food, because she can’t afford to feed them all? She looked tired and kept her eyes closed with a look of peaceful serenity on her face the whole bus ride.
Now I really needed a drink. Got to Love Hate at about 9:15, and there were only 4 or 5 other people inside. The bar was really cool, with a lit up red plastic bar top with tattoo graphics printed onto it, cool stained glass windows on either side of the bar that say “love,” and “hate,” I ordered our drinks while Dan went to the bathroom, and informed him when he got back that indeed, it was not cheap, and I really hope he likes his $11 jack and coke. Two drinks, one beer, and $35 more later, we called a cab to spend another $30 just to get home. Fell asleep at about midnight and slept until 8:30AM.
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