Are we locals yet?

It must be a sign that we already look like locals that we are constantly being approached by tourists asking for help with directions. Or maybe tourists are just so lost that they grab onto anything they feel might be sober. As to whether we look like locals, I’m sure that’s not the case as 70% of the guys look like they spend most of their days at the gym and are building muscles even on their gums. The women look like they are on their way to Victoria’s Secret photo-shoot or at least they must be on some different type of South Beach Diet than ours, nevertheless, I’m sure we’d look more than locals in other parts of Miami but not in SoBe.

We live on the western side of the island and our street is a mostly residential (read high-rise condos) neighborhood, so we are somewhat isolated from the hoards of weekend tourists that congregate mostly on Ocean Dr and Collins Ave a few blocks away. But on our daily walk, almost everyday we get at least one stranded tourist looking desperately for “the beach”, “the Versace house”, or “Collins Ave”. If they are asking for a Starbuck, you can almost point them in any direction, and they’ll find one sooner or later, but for the more specific landmarks it’s a little more involved, since you need to know which streets go all the way through to Ocean or dead end along the way. There is also the need to know which way some of the One Way streets point and which streets are for pedestrians-only. Amazingly enough, all the walking must be paying of as we are becoming quite familiar with all the short-cuts and ways to get to the different parts of SoBe, the rest of Miami will have to wait.

In today’s paper I read that someone was describing Miami as not being very pedestrian-friendly. They did point out that this was true for Miami but not for Miami Beach. When we were originally looking for our next home, we looked at several condos near downtown but we noticed that once you get down from the building, there was nowhere to go without a car. Since being able to walk to places was one of our deciding criteria, we chose to be on this side of the bay. Now I’m sure that the best way of moving around in SoBe is definitely walking or bicycling. Of course, that doesn’t stop those that have the extra cash from “investing” the equivalent of most countries GNP on a vehicle, so we share our parking deck with quite a number of Lamborghinis, Ferraris, Bentleys and Mercedes Benz and of course, our two cruiser AARP bicycles. At least our vehicles run on Cuban bread so I think I have them beat.

Note: Yes, Rosie, Gloria and several others live on Star Island which is the island right in front of us. So we could almost say that they are our neighbors from across the street. Shaq once resided on the island but I'm not sure if the property is still his. Maybe he was renting.