No, I didn't go down there to listen to dubstep music. I made the trip to watch my first-ever live UFC show and to watch a regular season baseball game at the great Marlins Ballpark. However, I heard dubstep there and while passing by the Hot Topic in the Aventura Mall late Saturday morning. I guess the style is rather hip in that part of Florida, which is no surprise to me given that dance music is pretty “over” around Miami.
This will mainly be about my time down in South Florida, as otherwise I was rather boring. There really isn't anything to say about Monday through Thursday, besides the fact that it was pretty rainy. One day I got rained on quite a bit as I was leaving the local Publix, where I went to get a sandwich. Really, that was the highlight for that period of time. I really was that damn boring.
So, let me skip ahead to Friday. I left in the morning and drove down to Ft. Lauderdale and the hotel, an Extended Stay America. The first part was fine but the last part it was pouring rain. You can just imagine how bad traffic got, given that it was South Florida and the sky water was added. I'll just mention this now: as always, the traffic in South Florida was rather wretched. There's a lot of horn honking, it was crowded, and man were there some maniacs on the road, flying by you going WAY too fast.
I checked in and I did not have too much time to spend there as I needed to go to the BankAtlantic Center in nearby Sunrise to watch the UFC show. The tickets weren't cheap but given that they have 10 to 12 fights per show I guess the prices aren't that bad. The event lasted for almost SIX hours. It would have been nice if they had working Wi-Fi there, but I was never able to get it to work. Figures. I don't know what it is about Wi-Fi and South Florida, but it's usually a disaster. At the baseball game I went to on Saturday night it only worked occasionally. Thankfully I had zero trouble with it at the hotel.
It was an FX show so in this case there were two fights on Facebook, six on FuelTV, and the final four on FX. I've definitely heard mixed reviews for the event but I say those Negative Nancy's are smoking some crack, as I thought all the fights were at least fine. All the talk about those early fights being terrible... that's poppycock. There was one fight in the undercard that featured a major beating. Then, three of the four fights in the main card ended in very memorable fashion, and the actual main event was a three round battle that was quite fun to watch. It was a rematch of a great bout that happened in March and it ended up being a draw. The second battle was more real good than great but still it was sweet.
The card wasn't star-studded by any means but it's still disappointing there were less than 7,000 people there. And I wish the crowd there wouldn't have been lame-ass idiots who were way too quick to boo. And I wish that the state commission wouldn't have required them to use local judges and referees as at times they were rather inept. None of the fights really got ruined, so that was good. Given that the UFC had not been in the state since '09 and with how things turned out it may be until at least '15, if not longer. All that said, I still had a real good time there and I am glad I finally was able to see an event live.
Saturday morning, I checked out and I ended up going to the Aventura Mall and this time I was able to spend more time there. I walked around and I did purchase an item, which was a snazzy shirt from American Eagle for real cheap. I also had some gelato while I was there, and that was great. Oh, and the place is so nice they have some great vehicles on display, like an Audi R8 and a Fisker Karma, an electric/gas car (like the Volt, except it's over 100,000 bucks) which looks fantastic but I know is unfortunately highly unreliable. I then went to South Beach; I just drove around to see what was new; turns out, not much is new, but I did car-watch. I saw a Bentley, two Rolls-Royces, an Audi R8, and... FOUR Ferrari's. It must be nice to own one...
After that I killed some time before going to Marlins Park to watch the Miami Marlins play against the Tampa Bay Rays. One of those things was going to Key Biscayne; I hadn't been there before and I happened to be in the area. I wish that I could have visited one of the parks in the area but all of them appeared to require you paying cash to go in them; no thank you. Still, I drove around for a bit and it's a scenic island, at least.
Then, I made it to Marlins Park. I parked my car in the backyard of a Cuban family in Little Havana, where the stadium is located at. It turns out, a lot of families do that for cheap and not that far away from the stadium, which is a very nice thing to do. This time I sat up in the upper deck and as I've said before I am perfectly content sitting up there at baseball stadiums at least, as it gives you a nice view of the entire field. Thankfully, I sat by some pretty decent people so I had no problems being around dumbass loudmouthed idiots.
As for the game, it was a bad day for the Marlins. It was veteran pitcher Carlos Zambrano (a real hothead who used to play for the Cubs; he can be wildly inconsistent) against 22 year old Matt Moore for the Rays who because of his age is inconsistent too. This time, Zambrano had such a bad game it was like he was still with Chicago and the final score ended up being 13-4. Much to my surprise there were many Rays fans besides me in attendance. The crowd wasn't as large as usual, but then again there were many sports events going on that night, from the boxing fight (do I even need to say anything about that one?) to the big horse race, to what could have been the final game in the NHL finals... and oh yeah, the winner goes to the finals NBA game played only 3 miles away involving the Miami Heat. Unfortunately, the Heat won that game and are now in the finals.
The only interesting thing to note about my time there is that they had an EPIC FAIL involving their big videoboard. It went black and it took them nearly 40 minutes to get it to work. I never heard of anything like that happening before... especially at a joint that just opened up 3 months ago. The next afternoon, I heard that the landline phone between the team dugout and the bullpen was inoperative. Embarrassing. I was amazing that everything went right after the game when they opened up the roof and they had a fireworks display.
Sunday, the one highlight was in the evening, when there was hellacious weather. I mean, a severe thunderstorm, and winds so bad that it entirely uprooted a big tree in a neighbor's yard. There was no problem where I lived, thankfully... besides the power going out for over an hour.
Next week, there's zero on the agenda. Still, I'm hoping for a halfway interesting blog.
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