This is a guest post by our friends Trixie & Rex, Knights of the Swag. Thank you for con­trib­ut­ing your experiences!

Miami. Pink sun­sets, flamin­gos and fake boobs. Frap­pu­ci­nos, fra­tern­it­ies and sun­burnt jocks in speedos. Psy­cho­path killers, hot soc­cer moms, dol­phins and Dis­ney World. Just as many clichés as there are major Hol­ly­wood pro­duc­tions. So one grey Ber­lin morn­ing my boy­friend and me finally decided to do what long had needed to be done: Hop on a way over­priced flight and check out the big myth of Miami. And most of all find out: True or false?

Right when we got off the crowded plane packed with pen­sion­ers look­ing to fry their retire­ment egg on the sunny side off life, it hit us straight in the face: We had taken the right decision. You simply know you are in a spe­cial city, if even Will Smith ded­ic­ated on of his few pre­cious songs to this place.

Look­ing at all the grand theft auto drives, lined with palm trees, you get a strong feel­ing of being in an actual Hol­ly­wood film set. With the world-famous mag­ni­fi­cent sky­line, the har­bor with its fancy cruis­ing yachts and all this poppy Art Deco archi­tec­ture. Everything so fresh, so clean and kind of sexy.

After hav­ing bathed in the col­or­ful and shal­low Miami Hawaii Shirt overkill cul­ture for quite some time, my boy­friend and me finally decided to do, what is expec­ted of us as, and live up to our own cliché: The cul­tured Europeans, with bad teeth and an even worse sense of humor.

Fol­low­ing a good friends advice, who had been to Miami Art Basel last year, we got up early and made our way to Wyndwood in Miami-Overtown, in order to check out the small local, yet dis­tinct­ive arts area and share her amazement for this old and up and com­ing indus­trial dis­trict. Fancy for a Ber­lin girl like me, who isn’t into spring break and drink­ing your own puke out of a red plastic bucket, yet.

Chan­ging from metro to the local bus –almost hid­den our own altern­at­ive Amer­ican arts exper­i­ence – it hit us pretty fast: Pub­lic trans­port­a­tion in the States is noth­ing com­pared to pub­lic trans­port­a­tion in Ber­lin. If you’re on a bus in the states, you’re pretty much a nerd, a loser or simply someone who doesn’t have enough cash to buy a car. (This then again kind of makes you kind of a loser.) Or you want to be envir­on­ment­ally respons­ibly and save the nature. (Which obvi­ously: Kind of a makes you a nerd.)

In our case the bus was packed with African Amer­ic­ans, His­pan­ics, Asi­ans and other “for­eign” nation­al­it­ies, which weren’t really nerds or losers, but all had exactly three things in common:

1. They all wanted to get to work
2. None of them was white
3. All of them looked at us

They were prob­ably some­how amazed by two young white kids, with cam­eras, try­ing to hind behind a tour­ist map in a funny attempt to some­how blend in. We quickly real­ized: Using a map as a sort of magical cam­ou­flage shield in a local bus driv­ing through a so called eth­nic area of town doesn’t really work – for some reason we stayed the unchal­lenged cen­ter of attention.

Still some­how dazzled, but also amused by this totally unex­pec­ted exper­i­ence, we finally got off in Wyndwood and hit the local scene. At least we tried to. As opposed to dur­ing Miami Art Basel the place was pretty much empty. We again felt like in a typ­ical Amer­ican movie set. This time: The West­ern. The streets were aban­doned, nobody on the street and graf­fiti of horses on the wall.

We walked around for some time put­ting stick­ers up, leav­ing the occa­sional tag and check­ing out the few open gal­ler­ies. Most of them left us less inspired, than we had hoped, but we felt safe between the nice gal­lery people and their “Honeys” and “Darlings” and some­times even “Hey Loves”. Appre­ci­at­ing the warmth of the local art scene – and glad Star­bucks hadn’t yet made it out to here – we hit the only café within miles, where we had cof­fee and food and coun­ted the seem­ingly end­less glow­ing apples and macbooks.

No big adven­ture so far. Everything left us feel­ing pretty alright, even the quite weird and com­mer­cial art in the gal­ler­ies. So we agreed to pump it up a bit and put the cherry on top of this unique day: Fol­low­ing my boy­friends secret Bay­watch youth dream, we decided to go to muscle mecca – a.k.a. South Beach.

Hop­ping back on the M-line, we made our appear­ance on the local bus again, this time without our map. After 3 stops we got off to change buses to get to the beach.

Find­ing your­self in the shadow of a heightened free­way bus stop is a gen­eral big city exper­i­ence. Find­ing your­self in the shadow of a heightened free­way bus stop in some deser­ted part of Miami, is a really spe­cial big city exper­i­ence. We stood under the free­way for quite some time and were happy.

After a while it star­ted to dawn to us, that we weren’t just in some part of Miami, it had to be a spe­cial one, because we didn’t see any white people around and everything looked pretty run down and poor. But we held on to our street-smartness and did one of the most nor­mal things ever, at least in Ber­lin: Wait­ing for the bus to con­tinue our trip.

The bus didn’t come. But more and more people came. Most of them fit­ting the aver­age black hood­lum cliché, we know and love from rap videos. The longer we sat, the more we looked like the cliché of the white col­lege stu­dents beg­ging to get ripped off, because of being in the wrong neigh­bor­hood. It was funny and fright­en­ing at the same time. Even the older ones had this par­tic­u­lar atti­tude. We sat there and noth­ing more happened at first, I was bit­ten by a bunch of mos­qui­tos while the bus decided to still not come. I star­ted to get, not really nervous, because I felt safe in the com­pany of my boy­friend, but a little bit more uncom­fort­able, with every minute. It felt like the net was get­ting nar­rower and narrower.

We real­ized, that we were being observed by a good bunch of people, repet­it­ively passing back and forth on the other site of the street. Circ­ling around us for a while, one pretty cracked out look­ing man finally had the balls to cross the street and sit down right next to us. He lit a cigar­ette and looked at us. “Yo, man. All good? You need somethin’? What you need, mayn? What you need?”

That was the moment where I intern­ally star­ted to freak out – pay­ing respect to my role as a girl. And also the moment to finally give my boy­friend his chance to live up to his role as a man – and get on a man-mission to save me from all this. He was pleased. We eased of the chair, gave the cracked out guy a “Alright man, peace, have a good day, my man” and engaged in the art of “How fast can you walk while still look­ing as if you have everything under per­fect con­trol and totally belong in this neigh­bor­hood”. Mak­ing our way as fast as pos­sible out of this rough situ­ation, I looked back once more and saw another guy mov­ing really fast in our direction.

“Yo, white boy”, he was get­ting closer and head­ing at us really fast. “Do you know where the fuck you are?!” We admit­ted we didn’t really know. He shouted at us: “This is fuck­ing Over­town! You are the only white people here! ARE YOU FUCKIN’ NUTS?! There is only one thing you wanna do right now: Get-the-fuck-out-of-here-as-fast-as-you-can!”

That was it for us, we got his point and real­ized another vital thing: Neuk­ölln is not a ghetto, it’s a nice place with the occa­sional stabbing or gun incid­ents. Over­town is a real ghetto. We didn’t know this ghetto ­– and it didn’t know us.

Our new friend got back at us, still rub­bing his hands and look­ing pretty drug abus­ive in his out­fit. “Trust me, but you have to get the hell out of here! The bus comes one time an hour! What u want? Drugs? I can help u out with that, but move your ass. I’ll walk in the same direction.”

He was, except for us, the only white per­son around. His eyes were wide open and he was a mad man him­self. His ges­tures were agit­ated and I was shocked by his whole atti­tude. He gave us again the strong advice to take a taxi out and that he could eas­ily help us, if we wanted to buy drugs. I exper­i­enced the whole sequence in slow motion and I was not able to talk at all. So we moved for­ward slowly, tried to look as if not in panic, and went down the main street until we finally reached a taxi. In there, I real­ized that the crazy white guy just prob­ably saved our life.

After driv­ing for half an hour, we hit another ghetto. This time: The rich ghetto. Arriv­ing in South Beach we were amazed by the harsh dif­fer­ence between to places in one city. While the Fer­raris and Maseratis where passing next to us, we strolled down the strip, mak­ing our way through the heaven of plastic sur­gery, tanned bod­ies and fake boobs. Everything was sexy and shiny and mostly full drunken Amer­ican tour­ists, try­ing to have a glit­tery, crazy neon time before they get back to their grey every­day lives. For today, I was more than done with this city.

Lay­ing down next to the sea, we were try­ing to real­ize what had just happened – or almost happened – and made fun of everything: The scenery, the people, the situ­ation we had just been in and most of all us. Because one thing is for sure: There is only way to handle this city – humor.

If there had to be a list of three things describ­ing Miami, I would put it this way:

1. Yes: Neon was inven­ted here
2. Yes: Miami is the mother of all soul­less– fancy show off tour­ist hotspots
3. And most import­antly: It’s not a false mythos. When the sun sets in Miami, the sky turns everything in to a peace­ful, incred­ible, almost magical light pink.

Maybe that is the beau­ti­ful reward for all those brave people going through all of this every day.

Love.