I attended a preconference seminar with Peter Morville today at the IA Summit. The summit starts tomorrow. I’ve met a lot of interesting people already. Kia is here and it’s been wonderful hanging out with her. She is speaking during Sunday’s session. We went to the mixer this evening and then went with a new friend Alla to Versailles, a famous Cuban restaurant in Little Havana. We drank strong sangria, I ate a lot of seafood and then we went to the Cuban bakery next door where I got the craziest Cuban-tiramisu thing. Nom nom nom.
Miami is strange. It meets my stereotypical expectations in some ways and is delightfully surprising in others. There are palm trees, tourist crap and gleaming white buildings. There are also tons of people speaking Spanish, but not Texan/Mexican Spanish. Caribbean Spanish. And there there is the Creole, which is so unlike Louisiana Creole that I actually giggled with joy when I first heard it. It bubbles and is full of Haitian French and African nuances. It’s gorgeous, and those that can speak it seem to have a lightness to them that the rest of the Miamians don’t have.
I’m staying downtown in a hotel by the conference center, so I know this is nothing like the Miami that locals know. It was nice to go farther out into a neighborhood tonight. Kia is threatening to take me to South Beach, which should be, um, something.