"Una taza de café por favor."

We'll be off to Florida tomorrow for a week to visit Jude's aunt and uncle in Ocala. I know, no one knows where or what it is. It's a little town two hours north of Orlando known for horse farms and little else. It's kinda of a strange place- not quite rural, but too rural to be suburban, wealthy because of the horse farms, but with pockets of ghetto redneck areas, and a generic EveryAmericanTownCenter with its huge Barnes & Noble (with in-house Starbucks of course) and JC Penny-esque department store (kinda like every Singaporean neighborhood central with a Giordano, U2 and Bread Talk). We never quite do anything when we're there. A day comprises of waking up early to wash the horses, feed them and hitch them on a buggy to ride. Then you sit at home out of the heat and humidity for the rest of the day with an afternoon nap, a book and hopefully cable TV. The day crawls by without you seeing another human being. I like it because it's really quite relaxing, but if I have to stay there for more than a week, I think I'll slit my wrist or asphyxiate myself in horse feed. The Florida where nothing ever happens.

Then there's the other Florida where everything happens, where every other person you see speaks Spanish, where no one is a native Floridan, and the only place in this country where it's mandatory that men are greasy, gleaming and strut around in white shirts with white pants and white shoes. Miami and everything else south. We'll be spending a day in Miami and then driving down Highway One through the Florida Keys all the way to Key West. This is of course the lousiest time in the year to be in Florida when the heat and humidity are at their absolute highest, but as long as there is seafood, beaches and blue water, I don't care. And then there's Cuban coffee.