Showing posts with label Hialeah. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hialeah. Show all posts

Saturday, February 07, 2009

Sweet Home Hialeah

Hialeah has recently been put on Forbes ten most boring cities list. How this could be I cannot imagine because Hialeah is anything but boring.
It's a city that grew from a cockaroach infested agricultural flatland surrounded by brown canals into a cracked up kaleidoscope of Cuban culture. Gone are the beige and white Miami box homes, replaced by hot tropical pink concrete stuccoed palaces surrounded by iron grilled gates with statues of the Virgin Mary on every corner, or maybe St. Barbara for all I know. But hey, not just anyone could dream up what one could do with a house architecturally without ever pulling a single permit, so give Hialeaheans credit. Of course, it helps that Code Enforcement in Hialeah could always be bought for less than a bottle of good rum, but it still comes down to good old creative Cuban ingenuity and cohones.
Hialeah is not a rich city, it's a raw, fugly city where the smell of areapas & strong cuban coffee permeates every tiny strip mall, music and horns blare everywhere, and a town where you can drive as if you had never left Havana. Grab lunch from a street vendor without ever leaving your car, or even having to stop your car.

Boring? Go visit & judge for yourself.






Sunday, August 03, 2008

Goat Head Soup

Santeria practitioners have been sent to the back of the bus when it comes to animal sacrificing in Broward county. Goats and chickens in Ft. Lauderdale can heave a sigh of relief knowing that the only place in South Florida they are not safe would be in the greater Miami/Hialeah area. If they are smart domestic animals they will stick far north of the Palmetto.

There is an estimated 100,000 people practicing the Santeria religion in South Flo, and if you want more information on animal sacrificing techniques you can either visit the Lukimi church in Hialeah, or take a course in Afro Cuban Divination at FIU this fall (I swear to God). Practitioners cite their rights to tack goat heads to trees under religious freedom laws, and hope that tolerance for ritualistically skinned animals improves. Oh, yeah, that is going to happen here in Weston. Can't you just see the quaint little Santeria shop opening next to Starbucks?

My only personal experience with the dark side was to stumble upon a fully dressed chicken (minus a head) sitting tied to a small chair in the middle of the road. If you have any idea what this might represent, feel free to chime in...