The Long March thru South Beach

I love to walk.
(Speaking of which, Guillermina: what happened to Jill's and my beautiful texts with thoughts about walking for Urbana Magazine? I think I´ll have to publish it here, :-) ).
And the evening was lovely. Warm and dry, the way December evenings are in Miami Beach. So the walk between the Sanctuary (18th & James) to the Bentley (5th & Ocean) and then back to the Sanctuary and to the Setai (20th & Collins) was a pleasure.
Even more so, as with the camera you can get into the Holiday spirit even if you don't observe holidays that much and start thinking about next year.
Beautiful relaxing feeling with some nice pictures you can see in the photo gallery, going down Collins and back up on Washington. I even tried to catch the fabled 25 cent South Beach local bus, which supposedly will make people less car-centric (wouldn´t that be nice...). Problem on a Friday night: I wasn't passed by one in 25 minutes of walking on its route. And I thought the transit strike was in New York. Silly me.

My visual highlight needs a bit of explaining for those who don't immediately associate the story with the words "La Mano de Dios". All soccer fans do. Argentinean's because they can celebrate the typically argentinian form of cheating, being "el vivo" or "piola". English people with their sense for fair play hate exactly the same Hand of God. Argentina was playing England in the soccer world cup, just some years after the Malvinas (Brits call it Falklands) war. So it might be understandable that the diminutive Diego Armando Maradona (maybe 5'7" in high heels) attributed the fact that the ball ended in England's net over the jumping english goalie (maybe 6'3" plus outstretched arms) to the Hand of God. Well, it was Diego's hand, obviously. The whole world minus one person saw it (Ok, we can confess now, even Maradona did recently). That person was the referee of the game. 1:0 Argentina. On the other hand the most spectacular soccer goal people have seen followed a couple of minutes later. The emboldened Maradona taking the ball at midfield and dribbling past seven or eight english players (some of them twice), as if they were slalom sticks. There's a reason people elect that one over and over again as Goal of the Century. Sorry, got lost in reconuting this story, which brings happy Argentinian memories (we even went on and beat the Germans in the finals. Campeones!).
Let me assume the store owner celebrating the 20th anniversary of La mano de Dios on Washington Av speaks castellano, the argentinian version of spanish. Vamos, Dieguito! Che! Vos!

By the way. It is nice to find art lying on the street in Miami Beach (18th & Collins). I wanted to take it, but it was a bit big ...

tomáš

SoBe walking gallery here...