Spanish Speaking Vacation in Miami

[johnny0881]

My wife and I just came back from a one week vacation in Miami Beach/South Beach area. While Miami Beach is a highly touristic area and the equivalent of, say, Times Square in NYC, and a highly bilingual area due to the tourists that flock to the area from literally all over the world, I found that we still found ourselves speaking to people in Spanish about 95% of the time. Heck, we started speaking Spanish the minute we got off the airplane and took our car service to our hotel. While walking through the main strip, Ocean Drive, you know where all the luxurious restaurants and hotels are right next to the beach, many of the attractive waitresses and waiters would automatically address us in Spanish to lure us into their establishments. Everywhere we ate, drank, slept and did business in, we spoke exclusively in Spanish. The hotel where we stood, you guessed it, Spanish. Every supermarket, corner store, travel agency, Spanish. The only place I remember using English was in Burger King, and that's because the staff was almost entirely African American with the exception of maybe one employee. We found ourselves using a lot more Spanish than we do back home in NYC, except when we are in highly Hispanic neighborhoods such as Washington Heights, Jackson Heights and Corona, where the Spanish experience is very similar to South Florida's. I'm pretty sure most of these people in MB were bilingual given their location, but we felt the preferred language to address fellow Latin Americans was Spanish in all cases. If we had this experience in a highly touristic, if not the most touristic place in Miami Dade county, I'm sure the presence of Spanish was much stronger in the city of Miami and its surroundings.

[flyers29]

Originally Posted by johnny0881

My wife and I just came back from a one week vacation in Miami Beach/South Beach area. While Miami Beach is a highly touristic area and the equivalent of, say, Times Square in NYC, and a highly bilingual area due to the tourists that flock to the area from literally all over the world, I found that we still found ourselves speaking to people in Spanish about 95% of the time. Heck, we started speaking Spanish the minute we got off the airplane and took our car service to our hotel. While walking through the main strip, Ocean Drive, you know where all the luxurious restaurants and hotels are right next to the beach, many of the attractive waitresses and waiters would automatically address us in Spanish to lure us into their establishments. Everywhere we ate, drank, slept and did business in, we spoke exclusively in Spanish. The hotel where we stood, you guessed it, Spanish. Every supermarket, corner store, travel agency, Spanish. The only place I remember using English was in Burger King, and that's because the staff was almost entirely African American with the exception of maybe one employee. We found ourselves using a lot more Spanish than we do back home in NYC, except when we are in highly Hispanic neighborhoods such as Washington Heights, Jackson Heights and Corona, where the Spanish experience is very similar to South Florida's. I'm pretty sure most of these people in MB were bilingual given their location, but we felt the preferred language to address fellow Latin Americans was Spanish in all cases. If we had this experience in a highly touristic, if not the most touristic place in Miami Dade county, I'm sure the presence of Spanish was much stronger in the city of Miami and its surroundings.

I'm going to guess that you "look" Hispanic. I'm quite obviously Caucasian, so while getting addressed in Spanish happens sometimes to me I usually get addressed in English.

[johnny0881]

Well, if you mean do I have dark skin, black hair and black eyes? Yes, I do, my wife, however, doesn't. She could easily pass for a Jewish girl. She has white skin and light brown eyes and we both received the same treatment. My guess is that Spanish is spoken to you regardless of what you look like. My guess is because of the high amount of Spanish speakers down here from Cuba, Argentina and even Mexico who are Caucasian and look like "gringos", so to locals, anyone could be a Spanish speaker.