TWP Returns: Miami

I'm excited to announce that The Wandering Penguin is back!

It's been a hell of a year, but I'm back on the road again. My last trip had an unplanned and unfortunate end in Eastern Siberia, and now I find myself on a very different kind of trip - a road trip through the US. The next few weeks promise to be action-packed and interesting, but more on that later. I find myself at home in Jerusalem after finishing my first semester of college and taking exams online. My initial destination: Miami.

Illegal Fruit and Plenty of Crying - Don't Travel on Christmas

I got on a flight to Newark and found myself sitting next to a girl of about 18. In the nearly 18.000 air miles I had logged since landing at JFK that fateful day in March, I had always had a row (or more) to myself, so this was quite an unexpected development. The girl was upset her gap year program had been cancelled as Israel was 72 hours away from entering its third lockdown of the year. She spent the first two hours of the flight crying, and the following ten sleeping, thus perfectly encapsulating the spirit of 2020.

At Newark, I retrieved my bag, only to get pulled over by the Department of Agriculture food control types whose dog didn't like the way I smelled (after a 12 hour redeye flight, neither did I). They scanned my bags and placed a banana and an apple they had found in my backpack, as well as a bag of chickpea stew my mother had packed, on a stainless steel table, where they looked rather like pieces of evidence.

An agent approached me. "Why didn't you declare these?"

"I forgot I had them; I was supposed to eat them on the plane but didn't get around to them."

"You know you have to declare these, right?"

"That apple was probably grown in the US."

"That doesn't matter."

"Of course it does if you're concerned about invasive species."

"What about the banana?"

I was finally devoid of a clever answer. The agent said I would have to pay a $300 fine; I pleaded ignorance. The man said he would let me off with a verbal warning; I promised to never take fruit on a plane with me again and continued to catch my connecting flight to Miami.

I boarded the AirTrain to the correct terminal (Americans, take note: autonomous trains are possible, even on your home turf) and received a notification from Google: "Flight UA728 EWR-MIA cancelled". Must be a mistake, I thought, nothing to be worried about, until I saw other people checking their phones. A palpable wave of nervousness ran through the platform; everyone else had gotten the same notification. We all set off to find the customer service desk and I was placed on standby for the next flight, leaving in 5 hours, which I was assured wasn't full. We were told to wait by the gate where we would be notified if we could board around half an hour before the 10:30 departure. 10 came and went with no update, as did 10:10 and 10:20. By now, all 14 of us standby passengers were standing around the gate in an ever-tightening ring, at which point I realized all of us were Israelis. A note to American companies: Do not upset Israelis in large numbers. There was much shouting and general pandemonium, until at 10:27 13 of us were allowed to board. I had just watched Home Alone 2 the previous week but I hadn't gotten the underlying message: don't fly on Christmas.

I sat down in my assigned middle seat, a term which had essentially lost all meaning to me on my empty transatlantic commutes, with Israelis to my left, right, and rear. My belief that reality is a simulation gradually glitching out of control grows every day. I got quite friendly with Ben, a fellow 21-year-old who was going to Miami for New Years on his way to Santa Teresa, Costa Rica, which he referred to as "Santa" and "Costa," appropriately. He had spent several months earlier in the year there, and had plenty of photos and stories of his time in a young Israeli's conception of paradise ("I hadn't worn shoes or underwear in over month" was a particularly memorable quote). He was taller than me - around 6'4" - and used to play basketball, so we spent a while cursing the legroom on United 737s. He had gotten out of military service after an injury had ruined his athletic career, but the previous 3 years of his life had been "very fulfilling" as he had been working at his father's HR company (and traveling to "Costa").

Somewhere over South Carolina, the baby sitting behind us decided it had had enough and started screaming louder than I had believed anatomically possible, making more than one passenger instinctively duck for cover. Ten minutes in, the woman sitting across the aisle from Ben started crossing herself and praying in Spanish that the possessed child would leave us in peace, but even Latin Jesus on his birthday did not deliver. At least I forgot about my knees for a while.

"El Papi del Medio Oriente"

We landed in Miami, where I was pleasantly surprised to be reunited with my bag, which I was sure would have ended up somewhere else. Another Israeli Ben had met at Newark was not as lucky, so we left him and got a Lyft to Miami Beach, where Ben was staying. I said goodbye and decided to begin practicing my Spanish with our driver Jorge. I attempted my best Caribbean accent and asked him what the story with the weather was. I thought there was no winter in Miami, I told him, but it was 60˚ out. Jorge went on a tirade about the "horrible cold front" in the area, with temperatures expected to drop even further that night. "Nobody goes out in this weather, so I'm working during the day instead of in the evening. Tonight I wouldn't make more than two pesos." I asked him whether he didn't want to be with his family on Christmas, seeing as there really were almost no people on the streets. "Are you kidding? My wife would complain the whole time that I'm not working."

We drove north through Miami Beach on a road with endless speed bumps. "Speed bumps in blanco neighborhoods aren't bad," he said, "they're soft. In negro neighborhoods they'll ruin your suspension" (In Spanish, blanco can mean "respectable" and "rich", not just "white"). I grunted my amusement. "If a black person wants to move here, they wouldn't let them buy. They'd say everything was sold already." I hadn't been in the US six hours and I was already hearing about racial injustice.

Blancos? What are you talking about? The checkout aisle in a Surfside supermarket (median income: $86,000)

Jorge asked if I thought it was cold out. I said it was about the same as at home. "Where are you from?" "Israel," I said hesitantly, as I knew this could take the conversation anywhere. His face lit up. "Israel es el país de la puta madre!" (this sentence truly cannot be translated). "Nobody messes with Israel, it's the papi of the Middle East (think "daddy" and lose none of the sexual innuendo). Israel has nuclear bombs, it makes the desert productive, and you have God on your side!" God certainly didn't seem to be on my side this trip, but this conversation was beginning to change that. "What can Iran do about that? You have to understand - Israel helps the US, not the other way around." I was nearly beside myself with laughter at this point. I had just left Israel, but I had spent more time hearing about it in the past few hours than in the several weeks I had spent there. We arrived at my destination and I wished Jorge a merry Christmas. Welcome to Miami.

Orange Bike vs. The Universe

After some R&R to get over the trip, it was time to explore Miami. I was staying in Bal Harbour, which is at the northern tip of the island of Miami Beach, so I headed south along the coastal promenade. Many American cities are no strangers to hostile architecture, but the wealthy islands of Miami could have written the manual. The wealthiest communities, such as Fisher Island, are closed to the public with no road access, but even Miami Beach has figured out how to keep "others" out. The beaches are all legally designated "public", but are closed sundown to sunrise and patrolled by local police. The waterfront is built up with condos in quick succession, so accessing the beach from the road is difficult unless you know where you're going. Parks are fenced and locked at sundown and any benches you may come across have solid metal armrests in the middle to prevent homeless people from sleeping on them. I needed a change of scenery.

Try finding a gap in the property walls to get to the beach

I was staying at my grandparents' apartment and the building had a number of bikes residents could use. They were bright orange and had pedal brakes and no gears, but they did the trick. I got one and set off towards the mainland at a flat 8 mph, which was as fast as the bike would go. Beach towns generally have diminishing property values as you get further from the coast, but few places do it as exponentially as Miami. Crossing the Bay of Biscayne from Sunny Isles to North Miami was like a portal into a different world, with ritzy apartment towers replaced first by a strange canal-lined middle-class neighborhood called Keystone Islands and then by shabby single-family homes and gas stations.

I found myself riding up US-1, which in this part of Florida is called Biscayne Boulevard, trapped in an endless hellscape of suburban strip malls, concrete, car dealerships, and traffic lights. I couldn't even imagine how insufferable it must be in summer. I stayed in the right lane, thinking I would be protected by the large signs proclaiming "BIKES MAY USE FULL LANE", but cars kept whizzing by inches away from me. A woman honked at me repeatedly until I pointed at the sharrow painted on the pavement; she sped past me shaking her head. Change of scenery, indeed.

"Leave your things here because there's a good chance we'll end up in the water"

My tires were essentially flat and I returned home through Sunny Isles Beach, home to Trump Towers and colloquially known as "Little Moscow" (read this for context). I had received a cryptic text from my friend Jake, saying he had a plan for tonight and I was invited to stay at his place but I should pack "athletic clothing". A moment of introduction: Jake is a half-Jewish, half-Mexican classmate of mine who lives in Miami and is one of the most high-energy and entirely random individuals I've ever met. We share a passion for unusual travel, which is how we initially became friends and what made him a natural partner for the road trip. We got dinner in a fancy mall downtown which looked like it belonged in Taipei and headed to his house, located in a gated community with an eclectic (and not exactly tasteful, if you ask me) blend of architectural styles by the beach.

Привет из Mаленькой Москвы!

I was greeted by Jake's dog ("his legal name is Dog") and asked what the mysterious plan was; he smiled and told me to get changed. He resurfaced with a paddle in hand and we headed around the house where there were two kayaks. "Let's go visit a friend," he said and lowered his kayak into the water. "Leave your things here because there's a good chance we'll end up in the water." We paddled away from the shore, passing luxury homes lit up like Christmas trees. One of the largest houses was dark and clearly under construction; a flashlight unexpectedly shone on us as we passed by. "This one belongs to some shady Eastern European character, we think some high-profile drug deals go down there." I steered my kayak a little further away from the shore. We reached a different shoreline and slipped into a canal between two houses. Speedboats on boat elevators lined both sides of the waterway and it was dead silent except the gentle lapping of the waves. "My friends saw a gator here a while back." I was officially becoming a Florida Man.

"Every girl in Miami has a picture on Instagram with this wall"

We pulled up to one of the houses and met two of Jake's friends from high school. I was told that they were the only non-Jewish and non-Hispanic kids in the school (Jake was both, of course), which was the less-than-proud bearer of the title of highest rates of usage of multiple kinds of drugs in Miami-Dade County. It started raining. We waited for a break in the rain and slipped back into the kayaks to head back to Jake's around 1:00. The wind had picked up, but there was a moment of stillness as we hit the open water where I could see the skyline of downtown Miami and some fish jumped around us. It was quite beautiful, until the wind and rain came back, cutting the visibility by half and making us work to gain every yard in the nearly 1.5 mile crossing. I was happy I had spent much of the spring kayaking in upstate New York to prepare me for this unexpected nighttime crossing.