Welcome to another edition of the Shit Holidays newsletter. This week we return to Florida to review Miami, plus share some of the response to our coverage of Cardiff.
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Miami
If Prague is the ‘mother of cities’ then Miami is the overly touchy stepdad — a gold medallion sitting in a nest of chest hair while he rests his hand on your buttock and breathes rum-scented innuendos into your ear. Filled to the brim with coke heads, ass-drenching humidity and oversexed immigrants, Miami is basically a yacht party with a zip code.
Dreaming of pulsing neon and Miami Vice pastels, many tourists make the mistake of thinking that a trip to Miami is like being an extra in a Pitbull music video, when it’s actually more like being an extra in Scarface (specifically that guy who gets chainsawed into chunks in the bathtub). While Miami pushes an image of palm trees and pristine beaches, it’s actually littered with pawn shops and dodgy massage parlours and gripped by a horrific crime rate as seen in such documentaries as CSI: Miami, Bad Boys and Dexter.
The iconic South Beach is touted as a tourist attraction but is more a monument to steroid abuse and botched plastic surgery, where swarms of club promoters harangue visitors to attend overpriced orgies. Smothered in cocaine and crammed with trolleyed college kids, the city’s famous nightlife is less Girls Gone Wild and more the second circle of hell. Miami specialises in jamming throngs of randy vacationers into ‘superclubs’ and then charging them eye-watering amounts for bottle service while they eye up whatever piece of willing meat they can drag back to their lair.
Miami is also home to Art Basel, an annual celebration that combines the pretension of the art world with the pretension of Miami to create a kind of pretension turducken. It’s ironic that Miami hosts such an event given that Florida’s idea of culture is a stripper with a yeast infection.
Built on a primeval swamp, Miami is filled with plagues of invasive pests spawning in multitudes in the sweltering humidity, including Burmese pythons, giant African land snails, and New Yorkers. The city has been inundated by hordes of Big Apple transplants, who love to complain about the heat while simultaneously bragging about not having to shovel snow from the driveway.
Miami is a short skip across the sea from Cuba, which is handy for Cubans who wish to escape their dysfunctional Communist state by paddling a bit of driftwood across the Florida Strait. It’s also handy for getting back once they realise their mistake.
Miami Facts
Population: 471,000.
Founded: 1896.
Currency: US dollar, cocaine, rum-based cocktails.
Language: English, Spanish.
Demonym: Miamoron.
Also known as: The Magic City, North Cuba.
As seen in: Scarface, in which an immigrant businessman falls afoul of the authorities while trying to live the American dream.
Most famous resident: Ricky Martin, family man.
Did you know? Miami has a number of professional sports teams that are ignored by the resident population, all of which have terrible names. The basketball team is named after a temperature, the college football team is named after a weather phenomenon that routinely destroys half the city, and the football team is named after the only animal aside from humans that rapes for pleasure.
Top 10 Things to Do in Miami
Start a drug cartel
Apply for a bank loan in a bikini
Catch a cocktail of communicable diseases during spring break
Crash a speedboat into a pier
Find an alligator in your swimming pool
Get caught in the crossfire of a drug deal gone wrong
Capsize an airboat in a giant swamp
Get devoured by a hybrid Burmese-Indian python
Defect to Cuba
Get Gianni Versace’d on your front porch