Miami Evenings in August

After work tonight, my friend Natalie and I went to the pool, went swimming, read our books (me The Grizzly Years by Doug Peacock; her Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows…which she picked off of my bookshelf when she was staying with me. That’s when I knew we were going to be good friends.), and dozed.

That is honestly my favorite thing about Miami, and what I will miss the most when I no longer live here. I love getting off work every day and heading straight to the pool, where I can do my work-out without feeling once like I am even doing a work-out at all!  Then sitting in the sun, reading my stack of books (or more often, research for work), or just taking naps. It’s pure bliss.

We later went to dinner at Versailles, a Cuban restaurant in Calle Ocho (Little Havana to non-Miami residents) that my friend Newman has been telling me about since I moved here, and I still had yet to try.  Newman met us for dinner, and it was nice to catch up with him. As for the restaurant…I’m not a big rice-and-beans eater, so that left me with somewhat of a limited menu. But I ordered the “Calle Ocho Sandwich” (came complete with plantain chips! Literally…fried strips of plantain) and it was pretty tasty. I know it is sacrilege to admit in Miami, but: I don’t think I like Cuban food. It’s very…hearty. Tania, who is Cuban, joked to me once that Cubans don’t eat vegetables. I laughed it off, and she said, deadpan, “No. Seriously. We consider yucca a vegetable. That’s it.” It’s true…it’s mostly bread, rice, beans, lots of meat, plantains, yucca, and guava. (At least the food at the Cuban restaurants I have been to.)  I love fried plantains, and I love their meat dishes – Cubans really know their way around a spicy, tangy sauce – but I need fresh fruit and veggies! So to fill our fruit quota we, of course, ordered guava cheesecake. Oh yes.

At around nine-thirty, after a leisurely dinner, Newman asked what we were up to later tonight. I blinked. What do you mean, later tonight? It is later tonight! It’s almost my bedtime!

Newman looked at me like I was crazy. Well, yeah, he said, I mean, what do you want to do after dinner? It’s Friday night!

All I could think was: go home, finish my book, go to bed.

So that’s what I did…except I haven’t even opened my book. I’m about to go to bed, it’s 10 o’clock on a Friday night, and there is no place I would rather be. I’ll grab a drink with some friends tomorrow night…but for now, I would much prefer to just put on my sleep mask, tell myself I’m going to “listen” to a movie, lay there and decompress from a long work week.

When did I get so old?

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