The figures that Miami shows are scary. 24,000 tons of asphalt, eleven kilometers of protective fences, tickets sold out in less than an hour, they ask for 1,400 dollars at the resale… Numbers aside, the Miami GP is going to be quite an experience that is going to mark a before and after, and to guess it, it is enough to know a little about the scenario.
Miami is not the capital of its state, Florida, which got its Spanish name because of ‘Easter Florida’ and not because of its greenery. Although there were already indigenous settlements, the first Westerner to set foot there was the explorer Juan Ponce de León, who will go down in history as the tireless seeker of the fountain of eternal youth. Miami’s roots are so Spanish that the city’s flag is a cross in the shape of a red cross that crosses from corner to corner… it is the flag of the Spanish Tercios, that of San Andrés, the one that represented Spain for centuries. Seventy percent of its population speaks Spanish, and only twenty-five speak English. Latino immigration made Miami their kingdom, and did nothing but help it grow and develop.
So much so that it is the third richest city in the United States, and has repeatedly earned the title of ‘cleanest city in America’. But there is a trick. The county sheriff—Horatio Caine’s boss—prescribes a $100-a-day fine for any cheater who doesn’t keep his yard clean as a whistle. As a municipal arrives and considers that your lawn is higher than what the regulations propose, be fined at the rate of those hundred a day until you pass the mower. Hence, Miami always looks so pretty in the photos… and the children of the neighbors earn their first fights and develop an entrepreneurial spirit from a very young age. There the “mama give me” has an easy answer: “earn it and you know where to start, look how the garden across the street has”. Oh, and beware of buying a shack that has been neglected for a while because they still force you to pay the accumulated fines of the previous owner.
It would be terrible if hundreds of thousands of families flocked to his smack-crazy compound and came home devoured by mosquitoes.
A few years ago it became fashionable to have a snake at home. See the curves of Salma Hayek dancing with a snake in the colors of BrawnGP in “Open Until Dawn” caused concern to many who wanted to replicate the scene at home. The problem is that over the years they got tired of having to feed the bugs, leaving them alone when they went on vacation, and some ended up eating the cat or the dog (!?). The solution was to go to the everglades, that is, to the marshy areas of the south, and throw them into the water. This ended up humping the delicate ecosystem. The snakes set up a menu based on birds, fish and alligators that placidly distributed the space.
The environmental disaster was served, so the authorities launched a plan of attack: pay people to capture the snakes. The hunt is usually done at night, when they go out for dinner, and they pay for their length, usually at a rate of $3,000 a piece. There are colleagues who have made a fortune playing at being crocodile dundee. YouTube is infested with videos explaining how they do it, and yes, it is spectacular, because they are caught “by hand”. More than animals. In Miami, pitbulls are prohibited, hence one of its most famous inhabitants, the singer Pitbull, uses that name to blame himself for being an awkward neighbor. “That pit bulls are prohibited? Well, here I am », he affirms, beating himself on the chest.
The largest and most shiny Mickey Mouse amusement park on the planet is in Orlando, north of Miami, and is one of the great attractions in the area. The problem is that Disneyland is, as they say, meters away from areas with huge expanses full of water and vegetation. It would be terrible if hundreds of thousands of families flocked to his smack-crazy compound and came home devoured by mosquitoes. The solution was to hunt down a representative number of aerobugs, analyze their DNA, and create an aerosol that charges only them without touching the rest of the surrounding flora and fauna. Several planes fumigate, loaded with this tailor-made insecticide, twice daily. The result is that it is easier for a tank to enter the enclosure than for a mosquito.
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Americans have an expression that they like to throw to the winds to cheer themselves on: “the sky is the limit”. Well… the sky or the 62 floors to which current legislation limits when raising buildings from ground level. That’s the cap. What is being done is to buy dozens of well-located buildings but with the ten or twelve floors that they allowed to be built a few years ago to blow them up, and build with that new limit. There are several projects under way in this direction, and the projected prices for its least cheap apartments is forty-eight million dollars. Yes, 48.
Chips has a friend who in 2012 moved to the so-called ‘Magic City’, the Magic City. «I was invited to an event, a presentation, something that I did not understand very well. It was in a theater, and it was packed with people. He was dressed in a polo shirt and Chinese pants, and he looked like a Martian, the weird one was me. He was surrounded by very young people, all in flip-flops, tattooed, with piercings, colored hair. They all had a backpack and a laptop covered in stickers. The guy who was speaking was selling a digital product that made everyone present fervent. Everyone went crazy and everyone bought from it. The one who took me asked me if he was going to get me in. And I told him if he was crazy. I left. Now all those nutters buy whole buildings, drive around in Ferraris, and have huge yachts.. It was the presentation of Bitcoin. They are all billionaires. Everyone except me », he says laughing. And it is that it is in Miami that cybercurrency mounts one of its most bombastic events every year, and in fact Crypto.com is the firm that sponsors the Miami Grand Prix.
In the words of the viruamigo, «Formula 1 here is not something impressive, but on the streets you begin to appreciate that something big is going to happen. For months people have been arriving who are setting up the circuit, with facilities of a caliber that have never been seen here. There is a lot of advertising, and it smells like something fat. There are resales with very high prices because tickets sold out months ago in just over half an hour. It’s going to be a bombshell for the city and for Formula 1. What about the yachts? You freak out because the yacht thing is great. There’s a lot of money here, a lot of rich people, and if you’re rich you have to have a big car and a yacht.
Don’t people take a folding chair to the beach? Well, here you can take your boat, to see the race from it, like in Monaco. They have set up a kind of artificial lake in the center of the circuit, which I believe do not even have depth to start the engines, they cannot navigate. If you want to put your boat there, you call, they lift your yacht onto a huge trailer with a crane, and they unload it back into the water of that lake. When the race is over, they take it back to the sea. It costs crazy, although there is money for everything here (laughs). It is a very rich city. They are building a cruise terminal valued at 300 million dollars, it is the largest cruise port in the world.
If you go to the Grand Prix and you want more cars, you can always go to the Miami Auto Museum, owned by Michael Dezer, a guy who moves around the city with a Bugatti Divo that costs five million euros. In the museum you will come across more than 1,000 vehicles between military, historical, sports mechanics or from the cinema. One of them is the Rolls-Royce Phantom III that the bad guy used in Goldfingerseveral original Batmobiles, the one from the Ghostbusters, the DeLorean from Return to the futurethe 1948 Ford of grease or the car mad max. Also the original Vespa that Dezer drove at the age of 16. Only in Miami could you go up with her, or with your usual car, to the door of your house if you live on a sixty floor. It’s just the height of the Porsche Tower. And it is that they have a robotic elevator that sends you to park your car at the door of your house; not in the portal, no, in-the-same-entrance-door… even if you live in the attic 195 meters above the ground. For all this, and for what they promise from the organization, you know that they are going to make what is put together in the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix pale. Miami will raise the bar. So welcome Miami… welcome to Miami.