So I’ve hit ad:tech Miami – a day late, mind you – and the vibe is totally different from San Francisco.
To start with, it’s way hotter. And I think somebody with a salsa ghetto blaster is following me.
Other than the phantom ghetto blaster thing and the Angela-soup heat, Miami reminds me a lot of California. There’s a mishmash of cultures, and language flows interchangeably between English and Spanish.
Having recently moved to Ithaca – which I only, naively, realized yesterday was slightly left of nowhere – the linguistic and visual spice is something I unexpectedly missed in Granolaville.
To note: I was supposed to hit Miami at some point last night. With a strong sense that the trip might be doomed, I called a week in advance to change the flight. A morose CSR replied, “E’rything’s full. Can’t do it for less than $350.”
I was like, OMGWTF.
So yesterday a freshly-graduated electrical engineering student from Mainland China drove me to Syracuse. We were lost for over two hours and when I finally arrived, minutes before boarding in an otherwise empty ‘port, the airline attendant smiled sadly and said, “It’s too late.”
She did, however, set me up with a flight out of Ithaca this morning, first class to Miami. For free.
I was like, OMGWTF. Why is everyone always so much more accommodating at gunpoint? These kinds of inefficiencies are why fem-bots are a major social concern.
So my new Mandarin friend and I spent a whole day in Syracuse, taking pictures of graffiti and playing in a big wading fountain. And this morning I took my first-class flight to Miami, where I now sit posting in the press room. As in every press room, I get a choice between yogurt, a banana and a bagel for sustenance.
The exhibit hall is tinnier than the one in SF, but as a kind of consolation prize there’s a shoe conference on the other side of the convention center. I walked over the exhibition and almost fell all over myself.
All that aside, let the games begin, yo.
