I am still drinking yerba mate, with mate cup and bombilla (having found a brand "para nerviosos" in Hollywood, Florida), but we are not in Uruguay anymore.
When we arrived here, I had not been in the United States for six years. This is not our first time living in the southeastern part of the US, but it is our first time living in Florida. I'll try to give a few of my impressions, below.
The first three people who spoke to me in Miami, spoke to me in Spanish. Some days later, when we picked Betty up from the airline cargo terminal, I also found Spanish to be the most effective way to communicate. But that was south Florida; we are now in central Florida, which is much more "white-bread."
My first impression was of excessive materialism. We are currently staying in the "canals," where almost everyone has a boat. But most do not keep them in the water. Almost every house has an electric boat lift that can lift 10,000 pounds. That may be due to the threat of hurricanes, I don't know. The owners of this rental house have about ten of everything, never just one. They are nice people, who have allowed us to stay here with Betty (not a small dog), and I don't mean to be judgmental--I'm just telling it the way it is.
There is far too little ethnic diversity in this community, at least for my taste, being originally from California. The area is popular with Midwestern "snowbirds," so in some ways it's like a little piece of the Midwest.
I'm a person who loves bookstores, and the other day we went to Books-a-Million, in Port Richey. I was looking for Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary, by Robert Alter (street date December 2018). This is probably the most significant Bible translation in a hundred years. Books-a-Million had more Bibles than I had ever seen in one store, and yet they did not have this one. I asked a rather zoftig young woman with plentiful tattoos about it. She looked it up on the computer, and then rather curtly told me, "It's not something that we carry," not even offering to order it for me. This didn't give me a good feeling. Since I was already in the store, I checked out their Newsstand section. I had never seen so many gun magazines, and magazines apparently about extreme bodybuilding. In front of these magazines there had been a pile of a 2018 book that tried to show the human side of Hitler: only one copy was left. The whole experience left me in a dark mood, and I won't be in a hurry to repeat it. I ended up ordering the book (or rather, the three-volume set) from Target.
On Saturday night, Sandy and I went to Skinny's Bar and Grill, about as full of local color (and good food) as you can get. On Saturday nights they have live music, starting at 6:30 and ending at 10:00 (at the neighbors' request). This was a pleasant change, since such places usually start the music when we are already in bed. I was happy to see only one MAGA hat at the outdoor bar, the only one we've seen so far. I think the bloom is off that particular rose. The band was good, and very entertaining.
Other than that, the weather has been mostly sunny. We are in a Constitutional crisis, but I have high hopes.
Text and image © 2019 by Donald C. Traxler.
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