MIAMI

Miami is strangely clean. At least the parts of it I saw were.

I left the hotel at 9 am, hopped on a #36 bus, transferred to the metro and went downtown. Much of the metro system and its smaller twin, a people mover that loops around the downtown, parallel US Route 1. In town, the road is called Biscayne Blvd. for most of its length. From the financial section south it is named Brickell Ave. I got off the people mover downtown and started walking north on Biscayne.

Someone is paying very close attention to cleanliness. Biscayne Blvd is immaculate, no trash on the street, trash cans are not overflowing. It was a little eerie, really, a busy downtown street in a major American inner city that isn’t knee deep in trash. I was impressed.

The #3 bus runs straight up Biscayne Blvd. I bought an all day pass for $5 and jumped on and off the bus as I explored the US 1 in town.

There’s a beautiful park adjacent to the financial district, which fronts on Biscayne Bay. A stiff breeze off the water cooled things down, even though the humidity hit me like a damp towel under my clothes every time I stepped off the rather aggressively air conditioned busses.

Perioidically along the road are signs that say “No panhandling zone.” Evidently this prohibition is strictly enforced as I wasn’t hit up for a single dime as I walked along, camera dangling from my neck, marking me clearly as a tourist.

Biscayne Bay sparkled in the sunlight. Sailboats tacked through the water and power boats zoomed along, ignoring no wake zones. Across from the park was the backside of the cruise ship pier and I could see the tops of gigantic cruise liners, their v-shaped structures sticking above the tops of the buildings between me and them. No idea what those things are for.

The downtown is framed between high rise banks and other financial institutions and equally high rise high-dollar hotels. Not many restaurants thought.

The wind was peeling palm frond of the trees and depositing them in the streets, where they looked like strips of tread peeled off semi tires until I got closer to them and notcied they were the wrong color. Slightly north of the park, three police cruisers, light bars flashing, clustered around a man sitting on the ground. Three officers were standing around him. He was looking up at them and talking. The absence of an ambulance led me to conclude that it was either a drunk or a homeless guy who had done something to attract their attention.

The homeless were there, you just had to look to see them, even in that high-end location. Mostly they were men, walking or sometimes riding bicycles, bags of clothing and other possessions on their backs and dangling from handlebars. I saw them sitting in bus kiosks or hanging around fast food joints. They were the only people on the street who seemed to have nowhere to go and all the time in the world to get there.

Go north from the downtown and the character of the road and its surroundings change. fewer banks and expensive hotels, more restaurants with names like Cuban Cafe and more cheaper motels. I’ll bet some of them rent by the week or the month and people at the margins live in them all year round. Occasionally, trailer parks are sandwiched into open spaces, always with names that sound better than the surroundings. Despite the change, the road is still clean.

Along the way, I passed street vendors selling flowers and a truck selling Salvadorean specialties. Ever since I came down with a case of food poisoning a few years ago from eating from a felafel truck in Brooklyn, I give people selling food from trucks a wide berth.

I eaten nothing for breakfast, so I was pretty hungry. I stopped in a Cubano restaurant and ordered the flank steak sandwich with red onions and an order of tostones, mashed plantains breaded and fried. I hadn’t eaten plantains since I’d spent a year  Dominican Republic in 1980. They were called plantanos there and I didn’t like them much. The tostones reminded me of that fact but the steak sandwich was delicious, the meat pounded thin and grilled to perfection.

Further north on the road, it changes character again. The Miami Jockey Club is an oasis of green calm and the houses along the road are expensive and expensively roomed. At the northern end of the road, there is a mall called Aventura, which I thing means adventure. The #3 bus line ends there, so I wandered around the stores for a bit, just for the air conditioning, then headed back to the hotel.

On the bus I sat next to a young man who told me that he had come to the US from the Dominican Republic a decade ago and joined the military. He suffered some kind of injury as he told me he was on disability benefits from the Veterans Administration. His injuries were service-related but he didn’t go into details and I felt constrained to ask him.

We played the “do you know” game, comparing places we’d been in the D.R. He told me he was from a small village near the border with Haiti, the one place in the country I never went. when I was there, Americans were being warned against going there because of some unrest. But he’d lived for a while in the capital, Santo Domingo, and we compared notes. his ultimate goal, he said, was to live someplace quiet in Puerto Rico. I wished him luck and got off the bus at the hotel. More later  . . .