Anyway, back to the subject at hand, which was surprisingly: shopping malls.  You might wonder why I was allowing Caroline to shop when I've been whining on about the budget for the last few chapters.  Well, I thought I had to let her finish off the big trip with a bit of a shopping blowout even if did mean we would have to live in a cardboard box on our return. 

So Caroline bought many things, including a couple of very cool jackets and a new watch.  She even bought me some cool new clothes, although strangely they didn’t look quite so fashionable when squeezed onto my unfashionably lumpy body. 

Apart from shopping, Caro and I did very little in Florida.  This is because we found it quite hard to get around without a car.  Not that a car would have done either of us much good:

The scene:  SYMON and CARO sit in a car.  SYMON flips on the windscreen wipers, then flips them off again.

CARO:      Okay, so who knows how to drive?

I'm telling you this, partly to expose my own ignorance, partly to excuse our own inactivity.  Oh god, we were useless.  We didn’t even have the excuse of bad weather after the first week.  On week two in Miami the sun came out and oh lord it was hot.  The sort of hot where you could fry eggs on the bonnet of your car.  In fact you could probably fry an entire chicken, but I’m not sure what that would do to the paintwork. 

So we limited ourselves to strolling from one heavily shaded area to another, seeking out drinks that were more ice than liquid for fear that we might spontaneously combust.  Still, it was worth braving that heat in order to appreciate the delightful art deco era hotels that decorate South Beach.  They are covered in neon tubing and painted up in different pastel shades of blue, pink and yellow.  During the day, it's like walking around in the Land of Giant Dolly Mixtures.  The shops are pretty uninspiring, (although Caroline's Spider-Senses detected two Gaps and an Urban Outfitters) so we spent most of our time wandering aimlessly, picking up groceries or going to the pictures.  Then there was the people-watching.  South Beach boasts the highest number of extremely Out people I have ever seen – and bear in mind that I have hung out in downtown Sydney and once went to an Indigo Girls concert.  What is surprising is the number of gay guys with really hugely bad taste.  Isn’t that against some gay law?  I thought all gay men were required to take night classes in fashion and accessories and not allowed to tell their parents until they could correctly identify a designer fragrance from 20 paces.  Caro spotted one chap with an open shirt and sporting gold strappy sandals, and another walking a pink Pekinese dog.  I mean really, how 1970’s.  Maybe they weren’t really gay at all, but undercover Conservative Christians or something.

So the gay population obviously makes up a large subsection of the local citizenry.  I have here some fictional statistics on how the Miami populace in general breaks down:

Strippers:                                                        22%
Rollerbladers:                                                    52%
Women With Fake Breasts:                            10%
Gay Men:                                                            14%
Pink Dogs:                                                            5%
Cuban Emigres:                                                25%
Cuban Emigres Who Plotted To Kill JFK:     15%
Me:                                                                      0.5%
Fictional Statisticians:                                         1%
Percentages That Don’t Add Up:  Oh never mind

That’s right, a surprisingly large number of strippers.  I know this because I did some extensive tv-watching research while in Miami, and there were lots of adverts for naughty adult rude sexy bits bars in our locality.  I didn’t go.  It’s just not my thing.  I fail to see the appeal of watching some bored bint wave her fake boobs at me, while sleazy little men shove money into her thong.  Also I worry about the hygiene aspect of the poor soul who accepts money pulled from a strippers’ underpants.  Ew.  If I were a shopkeeper, I would find out who the local strippers were and then refuse to take any currency from them unless they had had it dry-cleaned first.

I nearly got knocked down by several rollerbladers while in Miami.  They were all over the place and were something of a menace.  Not only to my physical safety, but to my self-esteem as well.  The thing about rollerbladers is this: they insist on being good-looking as they whizz past.  Lots of tall, tanned, blonde men with muscles, lots of teeth and large penises (here, I’m hazarding a guess).  After a few hours of this I would go back to my hotel and look at myself in the mirror, to see nothing but a large nose with bad teeth.  I don’t know why so many good-looking people congregate on South Beach.  Maybe there is a local ordinance or something:

UNATTRACTIVE MEN MAY NOT OPERATE
         ROLLERBLADES IN THIS AREA
                                                                                  -
            THAT MEANS YOU UGLY.

It got very stressful.  I gave serious thought to wearing a paper bag on my head and considered liposuction before I came to the conclusion that I would probably clog the machine. 

In Miami the most exercise I got was my visits to the toilet.  Caro’s workout consisted of her putting her pyjamas on.  This seemed to happen, almost magically, as soon as she steps into The Bed Zone - quite an amazing phenomenon.  However we didn’t spend all our time sleeping, in fact we kept quite late nights, if only to listen to our exciting neighbours, Fabio and His Incredible Shrieking Girlfriend.  On one occasion I came close to calling 911 as it sounded like he was killing her.  However, on checking out the situation through our peephole, I could see poor Fabio simply standing there mopping sweat from his brow while his girlfriend berated him in Spanish.  The pair left the hotel shortly after this, although a few days later I received a call from his probation officer asking where he’d got to.  If I were him I would have gone back to prison for some peace and quiet - at least large hairy bicurious prison inmates don’t scream at you in the small hours.

Gosh!  I'm making it sound terribly "Miami Vice" aren't I??  Well actually, there really was crime all over the place.  Right out of our back window we could see a bunch of homeless crackheads smoking naughty substances.  The police came to clear them all out at one of there, which merely resulted in them milling about in the supermarkets hassling The Lone Miami Tourist (me) instead.  They returned to their makeshift home about a week later.  We didn't mind.  They were a lot quieter than Fabio and his girlfriend.

I was painfully aware that Caro and I were fast approaching the end of the trip, and found that I was awfully sad at the prospect of leaving America.  I knew I would miss it.  Of course, as a cynical Englishman I knew that I should find it crass and excessive (which it is) but there were just so many good things about the place too.  Some of them most unexpected, the most pleasant surprise being the Americans themselves who proved all my preconceptions wrong – generally speaking they were helpful, fun and a darn sight more polite than most of my countrymen.  It made me sad to be leaving at a time when America was under attack, and all the friends we had made seemed genuinely fearful as to what was coming next.  Directly following the attack on the World Trade Centre, there was an outbreak of anthrax, adding to the paranoia.  No-one I spoke to seemed to know what was going on, in Afghanistan and no-one seemed to know what all these huge events meant.

Although one meaning was altogether obvious.  Miami was completely empty.  One Floridian I spoke to told me that South Beach should have been jumping in Autumn.  At the time, I hoped that things would return to normal fairly after a year or so, but events like that take somewhat longer to recover from.  In the years following our trip, Caro and I have returned to the USA several times, and September 11th is still very much an open wound.  It doesn’t help, of course, that their politicians regularly rip it open again for their own petty ends.

Still, I have never shared the feelings of a lot of my generation that America is this all-consuming imperialist state.  To my mind America is kind of like a big slobbery labrador.  Sometimes sort of dumb and prone to the occasional mistake like shitting on the carpet or chewing your slippers or selling drugs to finance the Contras, but mostly benign and lovable.

(If there WERE a United Nations of dogs, then Britain would be some old farty thing that spends most of its time kipping on the rug, Germany would be like Lassie or some other dog that you suspected was smarter than you, France would be some horrid yappy creature, Australia would be this happy, one-eared mongrel called "Wag" and Italy would be constantly shagging your leg.)

As the days slipped away and our flight home loomed, the tone of news reports gradually changed from "America Under Attack!" to "America Recovers", "America Rising" and now "America Strikes Back".  The whole experience doesn't seem to have dented American patriotism, as if it could (not that I think that was the aim in the first place).  All around us, Americans seemed to have entered one of those ultra-patriotic phases that is just a little scary and often in bad taste.  Everywhere the tourist tat shops stocked "Proud To Be An American!" t-shirts, or shirts that depict the two towers with "Gone, But Not Forgotten" written on them.  Good to know that someone made money out of the tragedy, huh?

(Can you imagine, JFK "I Was At the Grassy Knoll" mugs?  Or how about "Wehrmacht World Tour '44" t-shirts?)

Despite the shadow that was been thrown over our last month in the USA, our time in there was hugely enjoyable.  Although it bothered me that there are some things about America with which I never quite got to grips.  Like why they refer to biscuits as "cookies" and scones as "biscuits".  Don't even get me started on "jelly" and "jam".  Then there’s their obsession with pickles, because god knows you couldn't possibly eat a meal without having a huge green vinegary gherkin to go with it.  I mean, I'm not a gherkinophobe, but a WHOLE pickle?  Isn't that a tad excessive?  How much gherkin-fermented wind does one person NEED for god's sake?

Then there are those nice things that I knew I would miss.  I know it's stupid, but I just always got a thrill from getting my groceries in brown paper bags, like they do on the telly, and the general friendliness from nearly everyone, and the warmth we encountered everywhere.  And the sound of crickets chirping at night, and the wildlife in general.  Including lizards, although I had to keep that to myself because I didn’t need a panicky Kiwi standing on the bed waving a broomstick around.

It seemed like an awful long time before when Caro was VICIOUSLY ATTACKED by that tiny lizard on the wall of our hotel in Ho Chi Minh City.  On my last day I did a calculation and discovered that it was:

58 different beds
45 locations
30 flights
12 trains
13 buses
2 scary encounters with spiders
329 days
and god knows how many toilets ago

2001 was an amazing year.  However, even I had to admit that it was about time to go home.  Don't get me wrong, I loved every moment of our holiday but I was now feeling homesick on a regular basis.  I missed the inside of my favourite hangout (the pub) meeting up with good friends (in the pub) and passing the time amiably (drinking).  I also missed the conversations, the exciting cut-and-thrust of debate that we used to have at work.  (Typically such burning issues as, “Who would win in a fight between Captain Caveman and Fred Flintstone?”)  So Caro and I packed up a year’s worth of memories into our backpacks and strapped them on for one last time.