Fat bottomed girls

As those of you unfortunate enough to be familiar with Queen's work will have realised from the title, this is a companion to the post I wrote a while ago that maybe should have been called "I want to ride my bicycle". I forwarded that to a couple of bike-trainer type people I know, both of whom chastised me gently for my pusillanimous habit of riding on the pavement. Well, hopefully they will be glad to know that these days, I play in the traffic.

I'm cycling more this year. The route in to uni is a lot more agreeable. I'm closer by two miles or so, but more importantly, it's easy to get onto a cycle path. Previously, I had to go half a mile along a six-lane road, then negotiate a maze round a shopping mall, then dodge round some back streets, before finally joining the metropath (a cycle path that follows roughly along the North-South route of the Metrorail). From my house now, though, I have a quick 100 yards or so along a similar road, before I can cross it and join the same metropath. From there, it's a straight 2.5 mile blast to university. The path, admittedly, is far from ideal. The surface is awful in places, it includes chicanes for no apparent reason, and the junctions with roads are all set up for the convenience of motor traffic, meaning frustrating detours. But compared to last year, it's a great ride, the main risk being that one forgets to take it easy, starts imagining oneself as being in the final stages of a Tour de France stage, and arrives at university looking far from elegant; it's impossible to cycle at any speed here without becoming drenched in sweat.

My main ride of the week, though, is to Fairchild. Like last year, I have no other way to get there, public transport to the garden being pretty much non-existent. Unlike last year, it's now almost 7 miles from where I live. The way I take is, in many ways, lovely. I go through Coconut Grove, a pleasant shopping-type area, join the oddly-named Main Highway (nothing Main about it, not much of a Highway), and from there, go along Ingram Highway and Old Cutler Road. All three roads are tunnel-like, arched over with massive tropical trees, and since they're slightly away from the main urban parts of the city, great for wildlife. I regularly see iguanas, snakes, crabs, sometimes turtles. There's two enormous orange iguanas that I see every week, and one day, I'll remember to take a camera and photograph them (in the meantime, there's a picture at the end of this of a dragonfly in my back garden).

However, both Main and Ingram highways have no cycle lanes, no pavements, nothing. Old Cutler Road does have a cycle path of sorts, but it's far worse than the metropath, a humpbacked, bumpy ride over tree roots and through patches of sand and gravel, more like an offroad track than anything else. But the only alternative routes would add a mile or more to my journey, so I brave it. And it did feel brave, the first couple of times. All the roads are narrow - one lane each way - and the traffic is, of course, made up of impatient drivers, mainly of SUVs, 4x4s, hummers, pickups, and the like.

After a while, though, it turns out that the cycle-trainers were right. You get confident, quickly. These days, I'm a badass aggressive biker. If someone in a hurry is behind me, itching to overtake, frustrated by traffic coming the other way, I don't care. I don't huddle myself as close to the edge of the road as possible; I move further towards the centre and make it clear that he is not getting past me until the other lane is clear. I ride with earphones in, at low enough volume that I can hear traffic noise, but I was loath to do that initially. I've even adopted the unspoken rules of Florida driving, along with the codified ones. Amber lights, here, do not mean "slow down and stop".

All this road cycling is seen as somewhat silly by some of my peers. Several cycle, but all are terrified of the roads, and admittedly with some reason. Cyclists do die here, not too infrequently. But most of these accidents happen at night, or on very busy roads, and I feel perfectly safe on the ones I use. The only thing is, the increase in the miles I'm covering on my bike is leading to expensive thoughts. The problems with what I'm riding now are twofold. Firstly, it's too small for me. I didn't really care when I got it, given that it only cost $35, but now that I'm riding it more, it's beginning to grate. Secondly, it's inappropriate for the cycling I'm doing. It has a heavy mountain bike frame and 15 gears; I ride almost entirely on concrete or tarmac, and occasionally, if I'm feeling lazy, I change down from the highest gear to get up the landscaped hump on the uni campus, the only incline I ever encounter. And so, thoughts turn to a nice, lightweight, road bike frame, properly sized to own my gangly, lightweight frame... another item on the ever-growing list of stuff to buy. Sigh.

Anyway, as promised, here is a dragonfly in my back garden.

And here is a plug: There is a great show on, of all things, Aberdeen student radio that you should listen to. It's on Tuesday, 9-10pm. But more excitingly, you can download MPfrees of the thing here, and grab a tracklisting, and listen when you want. What are you waiting for? Show the man some love...

God was in the building

Last Friday, Barack Obama held a "women's rally for the change we need" at the University of Miami. Despite being neither a woman nor an American voter, I managed to secure a ticket, by virtue of responding to am email quickly. Can you imagine 8000 tickets, even free ones, to go and hear any British politician speak being snapped up in a few hours by the student body at any UK institution? That's what happens here, and several people I know who were far more clearly within the target audience than me missed out.

So with their imprecations in mind, I refused to be daunted when I arrived at the venue, 15 minutes before the doors opened, to find a queue snaking along several roads. I had completely failed to meet the two friends I was supposed to meeting, but luckily, ran into another couple in the queue. Luckily, because once we'd got past the airport-style security, we found we had a while to wait until the main event. Without someone else to trade cynical comments with, I'd have been forced to listen to the warm up acts attentively.

We were seated by about 10:15am. The man himself was due on at 11:45 (though in true rock star style, he was late on stage). In the meantime, we were treated to a selection of local dignitaries, legislators, and the like - all women - indulging in an array of McCain-mashing, Barack-bigging, and rabble-rousing. It looked like all my preconceptions about American politics were going to be confirmed. The speeches were punctuated by rapturous applause, chants, and cheers. The name 'McCain' was greeted in the style of a pantomime villain. We were asked, amongst other things, to join in prayer for something or other, stand and recite the Pledge of Allegiance, and shout slogans in unison. In between speakers, we were treated to a soundtrack of U2 and Stevie Wonder. It was loud, manic, rhetorical, and almost entirely vacuous.

Then, at last, Obama took to the platform, pausing on the way to shake hands, hugging his support acts, grinning broadly, looking energetic. He had to appeal several times for enough quiet to begin speaking, and throughout his speech, was interrupted by (and occasionally responded to) shouts of 'Barack, I love you!' and the like. It really is about personalities here, and people attach themselves strongly to their politicians. Again, can you see Cameron, Brown, or Clegg having to deal with such interjections?

Since it's about personalities, it was no surprise that the first portion of Obama's speech was based around personal anecdotes. The theme was women's issues, and each one he discussed was set up by a story about his mother, or someone he knew, or his wife, or his children. At this point, I was smugly ticking off my list of expectations. Anecdotes, vague promises, rhetoric, issues addressed in general terms... but no policy, content, or the like.

The second half, though, changed this. Obama went on to talk about actual policy, about what he might do to address the issues he was discussing. Or at least, that was the impression one got. But, thinking back, there was a curious disconnect between the two halves. Although he mentioned a fair pay act, and pledged to support Roe vs Wade (and thus abortion rights), most of the policy stuff was about the economy, the tax system, a bit about renewable energy... all quite laudable, but nothing really to do with the issues he had previously brought up. The neat trick was that it was hard to notice this, the speech flowed so smoothly.

On the other hand, I was surprised at how often he stumbled, hesitated, lost his place, and so on. This wasn't the practised orator I was expecting. He seemed far less polished, far less certain, then I imagined American politicians had to be. He was, it seemed, genuinely put off by a brief interruption from some crackpot protestors who were escorted from the building by some fearsome looking security types. You'd have thought he'd have learnt to take such things in his stride.

I don't know that I can I say my prejudices about politics here were dispelled by seeing all this. The whole thing was so much more managed, so much less about conversation and more about conversion, than any encounter I've had with British politicians (and I think they're generally awful too). But as Obama left the stage to the strains of "Signed, Sealed, Delivered, I'm Yours" (?!), I was somewhat reassured. The guy seems credible, intelligent, a person genuinely concerned with the right problems and somewhere in the ballpark of the right solutions. And, given how so many people here react to his campaign, it's impossible not to get caught up in it all slightly, and hope that his election may bring some significant changes for the better in both America and in the wider world.

He's going to lose, isn't he?

Start, stop, back, forth

I've been back here a month now, nearly, and it doesn't quite feel like I've begun the new school year properly yet. The past four weeks have been somewhat disjointed. The semester itself has had an odd stop-start quality; the first day was a Wednesday, then there was a bank holiday, an extra day or two off owing to (unnecessary, luckily) hurricane precautions... and more than all that, I spent a week recently in Poland at a conference. Completely ridiculous: I spent three weeks back in Miami before getting on yet another transatlantic flight, and was in Europe just long enough to conquer jet lag before returning. I did, jokingly, ask if I could extend my summer break by three weeks and cut out the big travel times, but since I'm teaching this semester, that wasn't at all possible (that's going fine, I'll write about it later in the semester).

The Poland trip was good. I wasn't particularly looking forward to the flying, but that was OK, I had a row of seats to myself on the way back which is a godsend on a 10 hour flight. Though if Air Berlin/LTU continue to run Dusseldorf-Miami flights half-empty, I suspect they may go the way of Zoom soon. I stayed a night in Berlin on the way there, and on the way back, which was lovely, just because I was staying with a friend who I had meant to visit during the summer but hadn't due to lack of time, money, and organisation. Better brief than nothing at all.

The conference took place in a tiny town called Kazimierz Dolny, on the banks of the Vistula, near Lublin, about a two hour drive south-east of Warsaw. I got there by first, a train from Berlin to Warsaw (six hours, unremarkable) and then a bus laid on by the conference organisers to save us a struggle with Polish public transport. It would have been a struggle, too, because Kazimierz is not on the beaten track. It's a popular weekend destination for Poles, but not at all on the international tourist radar.

Perhaps it should be, because it's rather charming. It's about the size of Ambleside, but considerably prettier architecturally, and with a rich local history encompassing plagues, ghost stories, tales of the old Polish kings, and of course the horrific recent past, from the Holocaust to the Communist era. The town dates from the 15th century, and became rich during the 16th owing to its position as the most convenient place for grain from the fertile soils in and near the Ukraine to be loaded onto barges and sent to Warsaw or Krakow. It's renowned as a destination for artists, and surrounded by ten km of canyons packed into a single square km.

Unfortunately, I didn't get much chance to explore them, because (despite what some have suggested) this was not a holiday. The conference was intensive; most of the above was gleaned during the single free session programmed, during which we were treated to a guided tour by a woman with the most fearsome painted eyebrows I've ever seen. The rest was solid philosophy, 8:30am to 6pm, and since it was a small event, a workshop rather than a conference, the option of sneaking off for an hour or two wasn't really available. Still, all the work was rewarding, and we did get a chance to eat plenty of Polish food. Hearty, I think, is the best word.

Anyway, I've been back here since Thursday, and after a dull weekend catching up on my reading and going to bed at 10pm (jet lag again), I'm now ready to engage with the new year properly. Main aims: expand my social circle and range of activities, and find something insightful to say about the elections. I'll let you know how I get on.

Our house, and all the other obvious ones

So, back in Miami for the new year, and a lot of things are just as startling as the first time. The palm trees, the lizards, the early, sudden nightfalls; I'm being surprised by it all over again. The night I got here, I was greeted by heavy rain. Two days later, an enormous thunderstorm. I'd forgotten just how damn enormous they are.

One thing that isn't striking me so much is the temperature. Though it's undeniably hot, and humid, it feels more like a duvet than a blast furnace. I noticed whilst in the UK that I was feeling the heat less. Perhaps I'm setting myself up for a lifetime wrapped in blankets as soon as autumn rolls round.

I've moved into a new house with three others (two yet to return from summer holidays). No longer a lodger. If you want the address, email me. It's a one storey place, built in 1939, so ancient by Miami standards (the oldest building here was built in 1877). The garden is huge, with a fairly parched lawn, plenty of trees - oak, palms, mango, avocado - and a jacuzzi. Yes, really. The interior is sizable, in generally good nick, but at the moment it all still feels a little provisional. The place came unfurnished, like most houses here, and though the landlord has donated a miscellany of old furniture, there's some way to go till it feels like a home. Interesting how priorities can vary so much; one of my housemates has been here for two or three weeks now, and has sorted out all the things he needs to work from home, but has managed quite happily without a saucepan.

So I've been spending some time trying to acquire a fair range of household goods. This is harder than it sounds. I'm much better located than I was last year, closer to one of the main shopping areas of the city, but that's 'shopping' in the leisure sense. Coconut Grove is not the place to buy kitchenware or coffee tables. Annoyingly, the place I lived in last year was; it was the day-to-day stuff that was maddeningly hard to get hold of there.

Choosing what to buy involves a bit of a delicate decision making. I'm normally of the mindset that it's worth spending a bit more on things you're going to use often, like pans, to get something that's going to last. But I'm well aware that (hopefully) I'm not going to be here longer than four more years, and there's no way I'm going to be shipping stuff like that back to the UK. So I'm trying to pick out the items that will last the distance, but not much more, and save some money by doing so. Mind, there's still things that I'm sorely tempted to pay top dollar for. Kitchen knives, for example. I mean, they're portable, right? I could bring them back...

All in all, I think that once I'm settled, nested, this is going to be a great place to live. I went for a walk around the area earlier today to remind myself what was here, looking with a resident's eyes - I've only ever been here to go for a drink or to the cinema. Everything's much handier than last year; closer to the metro, to a supermarket, to bars, to interesting and useful places to shop. And of course, I'm much better set up to accommodate guests. I've spent a fair bit of the summer sleeping in various spare rooms or on sofas, and someday, I hope that I can reciprocate some of that hospitality (though you're not disqualified from visiting if I haven't graced your home with my comatose presence).

Anyway, I must go; I need to check how high the bidding's gone on a secondhand set of Globals...

'High Class' Clubbing

As I think I've intimated, and perhaps you knew anyway, Miami has a reputation for glamorous, classy clubs. South Beach is supposed to be the place where the beautiful people party, as ostentatiously as they can. Probably the best known of these is Mansion. It's a noted hangout for all kinds of celebrities, it's featured in a few rap videos, it's successfully cultivated an image to fit the South Beach cliche.

Sounds awful, doesn't it? And you can imagine the corollaries to the above; dress codes, queues, expense. Still, it would seem remiss to spend so long in Miami and never go to confirm one's prejudices. Last night, somehow, the Graduate Student Association had persuaded them to let grads in for free before midnight (instead of $20), skip the queue, and enjoy free vodka for an hour. I have no idea how they managed that. Normally, there are three ways to get into the place without queuing for a good hour: be a famous person, be a member of a group including a significant number of attractive girls, or buy yourself VIP status (more on that in a minute). None of these being realistic options for me, this was the perfect opportunity to have a look at how the other half go clubbing.

There was one associated expense that I might have wished to avoid; shoes. We weren't excused the dress code, and that includes the stern 'no sneakers'. Now, I have to admit that since I've been here I've been seduced by the cheap cost of creps, and now own rather more pairs of trainers than I ever have. But my tastes don't run to 'proper' shoes, so yesterday's essay break was a trip to the nearby Discount Shoe Warehouse to find some footwear offering the optimal compromise between cost, comfort, and not looking bloody stupid (is it just me, or are squared-off toes really ugly?). I found something suitable for $35 (discounted from some risible list price). I should be able to get enough wear out of them in five years to justify that, I think.

Anyway, suitably shod, I set out with a couple of other grads. We negotiated the chaos at the door without too much hassle, drawing envious looks from people who'd obviously being waiting a while, and crossed the hallowed threshold into an anteroom with a small bar, bathrooms, and a roped-off staircase (I don't know if there's a cloakroom. Who goes out at night with a coat in Miami?). For no apparent reason, the staircase is hung with reproductions of miscellaneous French paintings, including a portrait of Napoleon, and Delacroix's 'Liberty Leading The People'.

Things get far more ludicrous in the main room (apparently, there are other rooms, but they weren't open last night). This is a big space, the majority of which is taken up by a VIP area containing the only seating. The plebs are given standing room only, perhaps two thirds of the area of the exclusive space, at the door end of the room, with the red leather sofas between them and the distant DJ booth. To gain access to this haven of comfort, one has to commit to 'buy' a table. This means shelling out $200, at least, on a bottle of spirits for you and your friends to drink at said table. On some nights, it's two bottles. So, cattle class for my friends and me it was.

Anyway, who needs bottles of liquor when you have free vodka? Well, as it happens, I'm on the wagon for this month (no big reason, several little ones). So I wasn't taking advantage of that. In some ways, this was a shame; a free bar with a time limit but no volume limit can be perceived as a challenge. On the other hand, maybe it wasn't, because I was at no risk of being seduced into buying $10 bottles of beer or similarly priced spirits once the time was up. Free from temptation, I sipped my lemonade and gawped at the decor.

Now, of course, one man's glamorous is another's tacky, and conceivably, I'm so out of touch that what I think is ridiculous is in fact the acme of classy club decoration. But, really. Glittering chandeliers hanging from the ceiling, along with branched pairs of shaded lamps fixed at intervals on the wall. A plaster set of arches covered in fake ivy. Staircases on either side of the room leading to the super-VIP upper level. Poles, for dancing, at the corners of the couch area. The place looks it was designed by someone who had heard a bit about how grand houses in Europe are decorated, and seen a few pictures a while ago, and just threw together everything he could remember in a big mess of glittery things and mock grandeur (I wonder how far from the truth that is?).

As for the music... well, it seems that Mansion sometimes has credible DJs, playing music that, if not to my taste, is at least chosen with discernment. But last night was its standard Friday night fare, and I can only describe the style as 'provincial English disco'. There was a leaning towards poppy R&B and hip hop, some obvious soul, an interlude of rock, charty house stuff - it was like the DJ was making his selections exclusively from the last five years' worth of Now albums. The kind of thing that, if you suspend your taste for an evening, can adequately soundtrack a few hours of drinks, dances and bubbles without leaving any lasting impression. But the kind of thing played in the cheap and cheerful places that you would never pay more than a couple of quid to enter, and they better have drink specials on too.

So, the evening passed amiably enough. I got to see the jewel in the crown of Miami's nightlife without any of the usual expense, and am now satisfied that the crown is gilt and the jewel is cubic zirconia. It did make me think, though, how long it's been since I went somewhere I liked the music, for the music, and spent a happy few hours dancing. A big part of the summer plans, I hope.

Summer flight dates

Since I've got them, I might as well post them: I'm going to be back in the UK from May 14th to August 12th.

Three months, close enough. What am I going to do with all that time? Well, it depends to some extent on whether I need to get a job; I'm still optimistic that I might scrape by without (though anyone with a job offer is welcome to tell me). Otherwise, well:

I'd like to get some extra-curricular work done - revise a couple of papers, do some reading;
there's some conferences I might go to;
couple of weeks doing permaculture at Glastonbury;
John's Rye weekend;
trip to visit people in Europe - Berlin, Rotterdam, Paris, Granada;
places and people to see in UK - York, Sheffield, Bristol, London, Nottingham, Glasgow, Lake District, Reading (if I must);
and y'know, general hanging round having fun.

Anything I've missed there? Anyway, point is, filling the time shouldn't be hard at all. Nor should it be hard to fill the time till I leave here. On which note, back to the essays....

Calle Ocho

Calle Ocho means two things in Miami. First, as the literal translation suggests, it refers to SW 8th Street, or more precisely, the long stretch of the street that's regarded as the centre of Little Havana. It's where the Cuban expatriates congregated when they first arrived here, and is still the place that news organisations go when something happens in Cuba and they want some commie-bashing quotes from old men playing dominoes and drinking cafecito.

Second, Calle Ocho refers to the annual festival held on the street around the start of March (a completely arbitrary date, so far as I can tell). The event was first held in 1978, and is intended to celebrate Miami's Latino culture. It's sometimes referred to as a carnival, but the pedant in me points to the lack of parades and masquerades and sticks with 'festival'. I imagine that it was overwhelmingly Cuban originally, but these days, though Cuban flags and colours still predominate there's strong representation from every Spanish speaking country and island in the Americas (and the Portuguese speaking one, too. This pedant in me can be tiresome sometimes).

For Calle Ocho the festival, a two mile stretch of Calle Ocho the street is bookended by stages, and lined with stalls. At most intersections, another stage is placed, blocking the intersecting avenue (streets run East-West, avenues North-South). The stalls are a mixture of food places, people selling stuff, and corporations giving out freebies. The biggest queues were for the freebie stalls. People were patiently lining up and waiting probably half an hour to get some free toothpaste, or a cheaply made bag, or some other pinchbeck, branded tat. Every other person seemed to have got something or other from one of these places. I couldn't understand this eagerness to grab corporate goodie bags in the full knowledge that their contents were crap, but never mind.

The smell as you walk along the road is exclusively of meat cooking over coals or being fried; Cuban cuisine, and it seems most Latin American cuisine, is based around huge hunks of flesh, often pork, cooked simply and eaten without ceremony. The most famous Cuban dish - the high point, the zenith of their culinary culture - is the Cuban sandwich. This consists in roast pork, ham, 'Swiss' cheese, thinly sliced dill pickles, and yellow mustard, layered between two buttered slices of Cuban bread (soft, sweet, moist white stuff made with lard) and lightly toasted somewhat in the manner of a panino, but without the grooves in the grill. They're quite satisfying, in a suspicious sort of way, but hardly subtle. In truth, there are some good Cuban recipes for things to do with black beans, rice, and so on, but not many were on display at Calle Ocho, just the meat. I saw one despondent looking guy sat behind his stall, a large pile of fruit and two pristine, unused juicers on the table.

The combination of this diet and the music everywhere produced some truly horrifying spectacles. You think the freaky documentaries on C5 are bad? You've seen nothing till you've seen a 17 stone Cuban woman dropping down and shaking everything her mama gave her and all she's added since to some dutty piece of reggaeton. Seriously, seriously disturbing. The music was, of course, mostly Latin-influenced, but this ran the gamut from the aforementioned reggaeton, to flamenco, latin jazz, Spanglish hip hop, some pretty terrible latino house hybrid stuff... and several more styles that I can't distinguish descriptively. Sorry. Peculiar exception: there was no Diplo-style funk carioca or the like. Maybe it just doesn't sound right at an event running from 11am to 7pm.

The curious thing about Calle Ocho, I found, was that though it's ostensibly vibrant, it seems rather polite, lacking in edge, somehow. It's a pleasant enough way to spend an afternoon, but seems too well-behaved to be really fun. I also realised, as I left, that I'd seen nothing overtly political, apart from the wizened chap in the white suit and red bow tie who is always hanging round the area with his sign saying "Muerte es Fidel'. I even saw someone wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt, apparently unconcerned that he might get lynched. I do wonder, for all the talk of exile, how many American-Cubans would return to the island if it were to be democratised tomorrow. It seems that the political attitudes are more a kind of article of faith these days, rather than a fervently held opinion, certainly amongst the younger generations who've never even seen Cuba. As Calle Ocho demonstrates, with its massive turnout and close attention from the corporate big boys, the Latino presence in South Florida is firmly established, and these days, intrinsically American.

More photos

For those sensible people not on Facebook, I've updated my Flickr site with new(ish) photos. It's a bit messy, since they don't let me have more than three albums without paying, but you'll manage. Some more lizards, some parrots, and a lot of slightly blurry eclipse photos. This was a frustrating evening; the cloud built up at the same rate as the event, scattered at the start, a complete blanket during the total eclipse phase, and then completely clear right at the end. Anyway, some of them are quite good.

Shaw thing

I've been trying hard, in best scientific style, to not just look for confirming instances of my stereotypes and cliches regarding America. After all, it's an enormous place, and as I'm told with wearying regularity, Miami is very different from the rest. This post, though, amounts to a long endorsement of the George Bernard Shaw commonplace about the US and the UK being two nations divided by a common language.

It's easy to trot off a list of words, mostly nouns, which have different meanings on either side of the Atlantic. I cooked a meal the other day involving aubergine, courgette, and coriander; after a conversation with my housemate about what I was making, I wondered if I could have possibly made anything (palatable) with more ingredients whose name we disagreed about. But the linguistic divisions go deeper than individual words. It's a lot to do with rhetorical forms, inculcated call-and-response routines, and differences in tone.

A few examples to illustrate that obtuse little list. During a class discussion on rhetorical figures of speech recently, litotes was mentioned. The (English) lecturer and I had no difficulty
in dashing off a long list of examples - 'not so bad', 'none too shabby', 'no big deal', and so on and so on. The American students were still struggling slightly with how the trope was supposed to work. The idea of asserting something by uttering its negation just seemed completely alien to them; the rhetorical form isn't part of American speech.

By 'inculcated call-and-response' routines, I mean the kind of everyday conversation-oiling exchanges that you can spell out in advance; greetings are a good example. I've still not got used to being asked 'what's going on?' as a form of 'hello'; my mind starts scrabbling around for a literal answer, whilst an American has some non-literal, non-committal answer instantly ready that gets the conversation going. By contrast, when I, in typical English style, greet someone by saying 'Y'alright?', or similar, they often look slightly surprised... 'yeah, I'm fine, why, do I look ill or something?'.

As for differences in tone, well, I think this might be the origin of the canard about Americans not getting irony. Most do, at least in print. But they often fail to notice every instance of irony in my speech, because (it seems) they don't recognise the contexts, intonations, and sentence-forms that indicate that I'm not being serious. This isn't just to do with me; I've noticed the same thing happen with other English people, in person or on film or TV. It's as if the tone, the tenor, of English-English discourse is more allusive, less direct, more replete with extra unspoken meaning and opportunities for irony.

So what of all this? Two consequences occur to me, one personal, one more general. The personal aspect is that, without (heaven forfend) adopting an American accent or vocabulary, the tone and content of my talk is changing slightly. I've been making a more or less conscious effort to not use much slang or dialect words, since I'm tired of having to explain them; but additionally, without deliberately trying, I seem to be using more direct forms of speech, fewer distinctively English non-literal phrases, less irony and so forth. I'll have to watch that I don't become excessively bland by the time I leave.

The general consequence is rather speculative, but worth thinking about. The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis says, roughly, that the thought of a population sharing a language is shaped at least partially by the nature of that language. A lot of people accept the converse, too; i.e., that the thoughts of a population are reflected in their language. So it's interesting to wonder about the American preference for direct speech, its origins (perhaps in 'plain-speaking' pilgrims?), and the way in which it may have shaped the country's self-image and behaviour. I also wonder, listening to the apparently vacuous pronouncements of the presidential candidates, if the things they say are in fact replete with meaning for an American, meaning that's lost on me as an outsider; that is, whether the words and phrases ('dreams', 'hopes', etc) just don't have the same resonance in the English mind.

I don't suppose that's the case all the time, mind. When Miami city commissioner (cf councillor) Marc Sarnoff says of the assault rifles he's trying to crack down on that they're 'designed to kill with lethal force', I'm pretty sure that he's talking thoughtless rubbish, whatever language he thinks he's speaking.

Full Cycle

Decent article from the Miami New Times here about cycling in the city (though the headline's rather lurid, and the webpage is horribly cluttered). If you get through the thing, you'll get a good idea of why Miami should be, but isn't, a great city for cycling.

I was never a cyclist in the UK. I always lived within walking distance of most places I needed to get to, and moreover, I always lived in places with many big steep hills. Miami has no hills, and most of the places I need to get to are further than is feasible on foot. Moreover, the public transport network is, at best, skeletal. So I've taken to two wheels, on a second hand mountain bike that's probably a little too small for me but was only $35. It has numerous gears; I don't even know how many, since I never shift it from the top one. It took me a while to find the top one, in fact. The right hand shift is numbered 1-5, and the left hand one has a series of lines with 'low' at one end and 'high' at the other. It was a couple of weeks before I realised that the lever could be pushed well beyond the point marked 'high', thus engaging a higher gear (set?). I had thought until then that I'd become disastrously unfit, but I was just being dense.

When I got it, I borrowed some Allen keys from the head of department, a keen cyclist, to adjust the handlebar height. He warned me to be careful, because Miami drivers 'don't see cyclists'. I asumed this was just colourful exageration on his part, but after a couple of incidents in which I was nearly mown down by vehicles pulling out of intersections, I realised that he was speaking with proper philosophical precision; they really don't see cyclists, probably because they're not used to looking for them.

Actually, they sometimes do see cyclists, and that's where the real problems can start. As the New Times article suggests, the attitudes of the drivers here towards cyclists range from the inattentive to the downright murderous. Riding on the carriageway (like you're legally meant to) is an invitation for drivers to shout abuse, honk horns, and if they're feeling particularly frisky, see if they can run you off the road by passing far too close and then sometimes even swerving closer as they do so. After a few too many experiences of this nature, I gave in and became something that, in the UK, I hated; a pavement cyclist.

I assure myself that this is less of a sin here, because there's hardly any pedestrians to mow down. I cycled 1o miles earlier today, and saw four, three of whom I passed on a cycle track/footpath. However, cycling on the pavement is frustrating. The surface is often awful, and you have to stop, or at least slow down, at every one of the frequent intersections. Better, though, than risking the road. My ride earlier today was in some ways the most pleasant I've had, because it involved some of Miami's very few dedicated cycle lanes. To be able to go fast and feel safe was a sort of revelation about how efficient cycling can really be given the right conditions.

Really, I should overcome my road phobia. Plenty of my peers cycle in the traffic, and none have yet come to calamity. According to the New Times, there's a small Critical Mass group in Miami. Hooking up with them, perhaps, might be the way to conquer the city from the saddle.

Seeds and saplings

I've started volunteering at Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden. Founded in 1938 by David Fairchild, an eminent botanist, the garden consists in an enormous (83 acre) site. The garden is arranged around several small lakes, and has areas dedicated to, amongst other things, rainforest plants, butterfly favourites, succulents, tropical fruits, and replications of tropical ecosystems like the coastal Florida Keys and the spiny forests of Madagascar. The list of individual plants growing there runs to 291 pages, a catalogued collection of palms, vines, flowering trees, orchids, cycads, and a host of other incredible, beautiful things. Walking around the place is wonderful, a visual, aural, olfactory delight.

I asked for a horticultural placement, rather than anything to do with education, staffing gift shops, or the like. As it turns out, most of the gardening jobs get filled pretty quickly in the Miami winter; come the summer, they're more freely available as everyone prefers an air conditioned working environment. So rather than working in the garden proper, I've been set to at the Centre for Tropical Plant Conservation.

The CTPC is part of Fairchild's research and conservation work. It's located about a mile from the garden, on a nondescript site behind locked automatic gates. The security is not just for show; some of the species under cultivation in the greenhouses and outdoor growing areas behind the fences are both rare and valuable. In the chaos following the last hurricane, some opportunistic thieves turned up with a truck and helped themselves to plants worth hundreds of dollars. The section of the CTPC to which I've been attached has two main projects. The first involves a set of lab experiments designed to assess the viability of the seeds of various tropical species under storage conditions. The work feeds into the seed bank project in Colorado; samples those that are found to be sufficiently robust are sent for storage there, to allow for reestablishment of the species in the event of their extinction (similar to the planned seed vault at Spitzbergen).

Though this is, of course, tremendously important and exciting stuff, lab work is not really my forte, and so I've been assigned to help out with the other project. This is a massive, ongoing effort to cultivate specimens for reintroduction into the wild, or to replicate fast-vanishing ecosystems. For example, the pine rocklands of South Florida, which used to sustain a wide variety of succulents and associated wildlife, have been under severe pressure from development, climate change, the usual factors. At the CTPC, there's a host of plants being carefully grown in containers for replanting, either within the garden or in protected locations elsewhere.

So my four hours of contribution to this yesterday mainly involved re-potting a succession of seedlings, vines, and saplings. Pleasant, vacant work. The Americans, it seems to me, have a habit of making some good efforts at conservation and environmental friendliness, but not getting it quite right. Recycling points only accessible by car, trying to reduce dependence on petrol by investing in bio fuel, that kind of thing. So I was only mildly perturbed when told that the potting soil used in huge quantities at the CTPC is mainly peat. Anyway, that aside, I left after my morning's work feeling happy that I'd spent some time mucking around in muck, doing something useful, and not thinking about logic. Although, given the massive rainstorm that soaked me through on the cycle ride home, I could have saved myself the effort of watering in my new charges.

Wherever I lay my hat

America is the only non-EU country I've ever visited, so I don't know if you have to fill out interminable customs forms when travelling elsewhere too. It at least gives you something to do whilst sitting in the departure 'lounge' trying not to gag on the smell of fast food and travel sweat recycled by the air conditioning. Apart from the obvious environmental reservations, I quite like air travel, especially things like the view of Grand Bahama, grey-blue and blending with the ocean in the dusk as you approach Florida. But the parts at either side of the actual travel - airports, customs, embarkation, check-in - sometimes seem designed by double-agent Greenpeace activists within the relevant authorities to dissuade people from flying altogether.

I mention the customs forms not because they're annoying - though they are - but because one question in particular gave me pause for thought (two, actually. 'What is the value of all goods that will remain in the USA?'. Errr, I have a cake. It won't be leaving the USA, but I don't know if you can say it'll be remaining there...). It appeared on two forms, once plainly, once pompously: 'Where do you live?'; 'What is your country of residence?'.

Both times, I wrote 'UK' without hesitation. It was only later, queuing for passport control and re-checking my forms, that I questioned myself. Nobody in uniform did so, they waved me through happily (as happy as border police get, anyway). But was it the right answer? How do you tell? By most measures, surely, it was wrong. Even if I spend all my holidays over the next few years in the UK, I'll still be spending the majority of my time in the US. I pay taxes here, my official status is 'resident alien'. When people, strangers, inquired about my occupation over Christmas, I said that I live and study in Miami.

It's irrelevant that being back in the UK felt like putting on a comfortable pair of trainers after a day spent in cripplingly unfamiliar footwear. Being at home is always cosy; that's been the case in the past whether I've been living in Sheffield, Bristol, anywhere. I suppose I now think of the UK in a wider sense as 'home'; previously, the term only really applied to Durham, whereas this time, I got that warm feeling in the pit of my stomach as soon as the tube from Heathrow left that airport hinterland and started to pick up commuters on the way into central London. But where you call home, and where you live, can of course be two different things, and in my case, it should be clear that they are.

So why do I write 'UK'? And why do I balk somewhat at the thought of doing otherwise? The answer's obvious, really. Despite all the considerations that suggest I live here, I feel very much like a visitor still. I can isolate three reasons for this. The first is that the culture, the lifestyle, the climate, remain surprising and strange. I'd forgotten, after just three weeks, how big the city was, how warm, how bloody awkward for anyone without a car. The second is that my lifestyle, at present, feels like one in which I've accommodated myself to the place, rather than settled into it. This applies in particular to my house, in which I feel somewhat more like a long-term hotel guest than a resident (through no fault of my landlord - I imagine this is just a general feature of lodging). Both these factors will dwindle, I suspect, as time goes on, my lifestyle changes, the city becomes mundane, I move house.

The third reason, though, I think will be constant; indeed, will become more acute as time passes. Despite the fact that I'm here for a while, despite the fact that I spend most of my year here, I'm on a finite time scale. A long time scale, for sure; very different from a fortnight's break on the beach. But I know that, once I've exhausted my visa and got the piece of paper from the university (fingers crossed), I'll be coming home. It may be a long, drawn-out, involved trip, but I'm really just visiting here. In my heart, I live elsewhere.

Well, that was all rather self-absorbed, wasn't it? Don't worry, I'll find something less navel-gazing to write about next time...