Miami

I lived in South Florida for 2 months already and haven't seen Miami yet, so that was about time to do it. Luckily Lera, an old friend of Mario's, came visit us several days prior and we had to show her around. The girl is crazy! :) She showed up here without letting us know beforehand. So (I believe it was wednesday night) we were getting ready to sleep, it was around midnight already, nothing extraodinary seemed to happen that night...and I have no idea why, but Mario decided to check his mail. There were 3 emails from Lera.

1. I will fly into Fort Lauderdale airport, today

2. My flight has changed, I'm flying to Miami

and finally the 3rd one:

3. I am in Miami, what is your cell number? I'll wait for you here till morning.

just like that, no flight number, no airline, no specific airport. That's Lera.

We came to Miami around noon. It was sunny which is a rare thing around this time in Florida. Miami turned out to be just a copy of all the other metropolitan cities in America. It was just a bunch of skyscrappers, modern style. Cold buildings and nothing else. Downtown consists of several small streets with lots of shops where Lera got herself 2 bottles of perfume for $20 each. Both of them cost $55 originally but to her luck the guy was jewish and russians know how to deal with it. :)

We walked a little bit along the bayside, took some pictures and left for South Beach. One Thing that I liked about Downtown though is the subway system that they have. Unlike all the other ones, who use underground metro system, Miami-Dade County uses upper-ground one. :) The trams ride one level above the regular roads. As Mario explained to me, they cannot use underground because the whole city is standing on a swamp.

The only thing we've done that day is just walking around, stopping at the coffeshop and taking lots of pictures. I am sure there are lots of other attractions in Miami though - Zoo, Seaquarium, several museums. But I'll leave it for the next time though.

Next stop - South Beach. Well...it was just a beach. nothing extraodinary again. It's about 5 minute walk from all the restaurants and shops to the ocean and it's almost impossible to find parking space. There are about 100 of different restaurants along the beach, some of them really expensive but other's have considerable prices and are actually very cosy inside.