Monday I drove down to Miami Beach to have lunch with a friend at A la Folie. The sidewalk tables were all taken, so we sat at a small round table by the big front window. A cat slept curled up on the pillow next to me. My buckwheat crepe was folded into a flat square just like in France; I washed it down with a glass of Normandy cider. A pretty young woman in a small round hat sat at a table across the room, looking like an ingenue from an Eric Rohmer film.
Returning to Fort Lauderdale, I stopped at Primanti Bros. on Oakland Park Boulevard to buy a bottle of water. The staff wore T-shirts that said "Bite Me" on the back.
Sitting in the front room at Lagniappe and sipping a Monk's Cafe Flemish Sour Ale while listening to the wonderful Gracie Terzian singing with the excellent Rotem Sivan Trio.
I went to the old Orange Bowl Stadium once - to watch Brazil and Hungary play soccer. The stands were a sea of yellow and green, with one small pocket of red-white-and-green flags. The people around me were all speaking Portuguese.
Two years ago I went to Sun Life Stadium to watch an exhibition match in which Lionel Messi took part. Everyone around me was speaking Spanish.
I suspect that Miami's new MLS team will not hurt for fans.
Driving home from the office the other night I noticed a new restaurant across from Hardy Park and stopped to check it out.
"It's an American bistrot," the waitress told me, and I nodded knowingly. Later it occurred to me that, 20 years ago, that designation would have sounded as strange as Thai taverna.
A few weeks ago I heard from a man - an Egyptian-American poet - and I emailed him back suggesting we have lunch. The place I chose, of course, was Rumi Lounge.
Yahia was animated and eloquent in his second (third?) language, which he spoke almost like an American. Setting his speech apart was the rhetorical flourish he gave his sentences. He had grown up in a cultured household in Cairo where his parents would hold literary salons. "As a boy I served coffee to all the great Egyptian writers." The current situation in his homeland depressed him. "People have two choices: the military or the Muslin Brotherhood. And neither of them is good."
He had lived in Miami, which he described as a place fixated on "skin," as in the surface of things. Then he quoted Borges quoting Milton on his blindness: "I have lost merely the inconsequential skin of things."
Saturday morning I drove down to the Miami book fair to hear Geoff Dyer, and yesterday afternoon I drove to Boca Raton to give a talk on travel books at the new library. I got a bigger crowd than Dyer, but I also put more people to sleep.