Same town, same hotel, Sunday night. I turned on the TV before going to sleep and found the Super Bowl. The play-by-play was all in Portuguese, though interspersed occasionally by the commentators' barking back and forth of "Who dat?"
The following day ESPN showed video of Brazilians gathered at Applebee's to watch the big game. They looked a little silly until I remembered the times I've gone to Brazilian restaurants in Florida to watch the World Cup. It's not just about sport, but also travel.
The receptionist at the hotel in Ouro Preto was beautiful and punctilious, walking me to my room in a red pants suit that struck an odd 70s note in the 18th century town. Still, she wore it with great elegance.
She was at the university, she said, studying literature: English, French, Brazilian. In the elevator up to the third floor, I asked her what writers she liked.
"It's difficult to choose," she said in an English that was not so much accented as caressed. "I like Wilde. William Burroughs."
"Burroughs?"I said, surprised.
"Yes," she said. "I'm into glam rock. So I'm interested in everything that's connected to that. But I also like Jane Austen."
It's nice having your article in a magazine, but it's even nicer having your name on the cover - especially when it's joined by that of one of your favorite writers. In the current issue of The Wilson Quarterly you can read Richard Rodriguez on Cesar Chavez and your humble blogger on the misunderstood workings and the underappreciated triumphs of travel writers.
This weekend I went to write about a luxury resort in the Keys. The landscaping was lush, the grounds were immaculate. Racks of spotless shirts and trousers hung in the gift shop. Guests, ample and prosperous, lounged by the pool or drank at the tiki bar. Nearby, a man-made waterfall splashed into a lagoon. In the evening families sat at candlelit tables overlooking the ocean, trying to decide between the fish for $32 or the steak for $55. And then what for dessert? It took a great deal of effort to imagine, a couple hundred miles across that water, the tragedy in Haiti.
When you're a travel writer it's a given that your job occasionally strikes you as trivial. This weekend it seemed worse than that.
Despite their opposite futures - imminent travel and possible sequestering - people waiting for passports look a lot like people waiting for jury duty. Few of them, for instance, appear to be professionals, adding to the theory that there exists a class of people who have other people to 1) get things done for them and 2) get them out of doing things.
I had these thoughts yesterday while sitting in the Passport Office in Miami. The office had moved since the last time I visited (2002) to the third floor of the Omni on Biscayne Boulevard. The new premises lent an air of efficiency that was not belied by the service. I presented myself at the appointment window and, like at a popular bakery, was given a number: A053. AO21 was just being called. After about 20 minutes I was called to a window, where I handed the young man sitting behind it my passport, a filled out form requesting additional pages and a letter containing the dates of my travel. He checked in red ink various parts of the form, requested $60, and then asked if I would like to receive the passport by mail or to pick it up myself. I said I would pick it up myself. The last time I added pages my passport was sent to a man in South Carolina. Probably a professional.
There was a long line of cars heading into Key West on Sunday. I turned off Truman and cut down back streets to get to Simonton, where I checked into the Southwinds Motel and learned that my chambermaid was from Zakopane.
I drove back to the art fair I'd seen coming in, and read the artistic statement of one of the exhibitors. "As a lifelong conservationist, the world is a place I have..."
"Let me know if you have any questions," the artist said.
"Would you mind a little grammatical suggestion?" I asked her.
"Are you a teacher?" she asked, after I'd corrected her lead. Her friend told her: "If you change it, I'll bet you'll sell every painting here."
Duval Street was thick with crowds reading shop window T-shirts. "Wish You Were Beer." Down at Mallory Square, a magician told a girl in the crowd: "You're too young for me. Come back in half an hour." The city of Hemingway reduced to puns, quips and dangling participles.
A more sophisticated scene reigned at The Gardens Hotel, as locals and guests listened to jazz (not far from a small pool Hemingway reportedly fell into once). Around 7 I left to stroll up by the cemetery, leaving the crowds and the music and marveling at the lush quiet and moonlit fronds. Though on Ashe Street one front porch held a multilevel platform filled with various modes of transportation - train, steetcar, mountain gondola - and numerous figures that, at the press of a button, took turns breaking into animated song.
Driving home the next day I stopped at Bud 'n' Mary's in Islamorada to see my friends MB 'n' Ron. They gave me a tour of their houseboat with its beer-commercial view of a palm-studded strip jutting into the Atlantic. Then we drove up to Morada Bay for lunch, sitting in the shade eating grouper tacos and looking out at mangrove islands. It rather made up for not having a white Christmas.