Travel Blog

Yesterday I drove to Miami Beach to attend the annual cruise conference known as Seatrade. When I was a travel editor, I went every year, because it reminded me of the world’s fairs of my childhood. There were simple booths instead of lavish pavilions, but industry and international culture were represented by people from around the globe, some of them in traditional dress (kimonos and kilts). It was always astonishing to see how much of the world has a connection to cruising.

This was my first visit in many years and, as always, I spent most of my time in the cultural section, roaming among the various countries, islands, cities, and ports – some of which took on more significance this year.

A woman from Greenland, who has been living in the States, said that when she goes jogging she puts a sign on her back that reads “Greenland is not for sale.” It gets, she said, only positive reactions. I asked what percentage of Greenlanders would like to be part of the U.S., and she said maybe five percent, explaining that some propaganda circulated that if that happened everybody would become a millionaire.

I ate lunch – teriyaki chicken, fried rice, egg roll – with a group from Norwegian Cruise Line who spoke Spanish among themselves. They were replaced by a woman who runs a luggage valet service for the Port of New Orleans. She was replaced - I eat very slowly - by a tall, bearded man from Puerto Vallarta who, when I asked him how he found the Spanish spoken in Miami, said that Spanish is not his first language. “Hebrew is,” he said. He was looking at Portugal as a possible place to move to.

In the afternoon, I spoke to a man from Barbados who told me that flying fish have become very expensive on the island. He said that young people seem to prefer soccer to cricket these days, even though there are more wealthy cricketers than soccer players in the Caribbean. He suggested I come visit.

I met a Spanish woman who said that, back home, she didn’t always tell people she worked in tourism. I asked her how she liked Miami.

“It’s dirty,” she said. “And the toilet in my bathroom is broken. It’s a $400 a night hotel."

The services are poor, she said, and the traffic is impossible. In her city in Spain, she can walk everywhere. I told her traffic was a bit better in Fort Lauderdale.

“Seatrade was there a few years ago,” she said. “I asked myself, ‘Where’s the culture?’ I could never live there.”

I told her there’s an art movie house downtown that I can walk to; that every November it hosts a film festival. She looked surprised.  

“But what I love about America is the friendliness,” she said. “We don’t have that. One day I want to travel around the U.S.” I told her to visit the South and the Midwest.

I made my way to the Baltics. A man from Riga said he wasn’t worried about Putin because Latvia, unlike Ukraine, has a border with Russia that for long stretches is thickly forested. The Lithuanian woman over at the Klaipeda booth was not so sanguine, while the Poles from Gdansk sat at small tables in private conversation oblivious to, or just not interested in, visitors. Perhaps they sensed that I was going to tell them about my book. Proszę Pana, napisałem książkę o Polsce!

At Cruise Britain I took photos of a cardboard King Charles and then ran into Kieran – a friend from Ireland – and asked if he’d like to pose with the King. He politely declined.