WGM Weekender: The Miami Transplant Journey, 24 Months to a Better Life & Friday Lunch Club
A deep dive into the 2 year journey of shedding your shell and becoming the Miami you.
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The Miami Transplant Journey: 24 Months to a Better Life
Month 1: Euphoria You’re at the pool on a Tuesday. You text your group chat a photo of your coffee. You’ve already said “I’m never going back” to three people who didn’t ask. You post a sunset. You post another sunset. You feel sorry for everyone you left behind.
Month 3: The Search You ask where the smart people hang out. People look at you like you asked where the air is. You try to explain what you mean, the dinners, the debates, the feeling that the conversation matters. You realize the people you’re meeting are obviously smart. They’ve built companies, raised families, made fortunes. They listen to podcasts on boats. They just don’t intellectually masturbate. They prefer to relax and have fun. It takes you another six months to figure out that might be the smarter move.
Month 5: The Dinner You get invited to a dinner on North Bay Road. You assume it’s a small thing. You pull up and there’s a valet. The house is the size of a hotel. The host is either a genius or a criminal, or possibly both, or possibly something else entirely that nobody quite explains. The woman next to you owns a boat that is unusually large and has a gift wrapping room in her house. The guy across from you claims to own a country. You realize this is just dinner for the PTA.
Month 6: The Publix Incident You go to the Sunset Harbour Publix looking for the things that made your old kitchen work. The specific Miso. The Labne. The bread. You cannot find any ethnic food. You have been walking in circles for 40 minutes, you are standing in the aisle and feel something crack. You call your wife. You say “I don’t think I can live here.” You are a grown adult. You are having a breakdown in a grocery store. On the way out, defeated, you grab the fried chicken because you haven’t eaten. You get to the car. You try it. It’s better than any fried chicken you had in New York. You sit in the parking lot and eat it in silence. You order the Labne and Miso on Amazon, they arrive the next morning.
Month 7: The Asian Food Reckoning You accept that the Asian food here is not close to what you had in your Chinatown. You try everywhere. You cry a little. You text your friend in New York a picture of what’s passing for ramen. He sends back a laughing emoji. That afternoon you are driving in North Miami Beach, you see a ramen shop, its delicious. You realize media doesn’t write about things like this here. Review sites only review restaurants like Amazonico.
Month 8: The Trip Back You go home for a wedding. You’ve been looking forward to it. You get off the plane and the cold and filth hits you like a brick. Your coat isn’t warm enough anymore, your body has changed and can’t handle it anymore. You see your old friends. They’re tired, aged, and pale. They’re complaining about the same things they were complaining about when you left. The restaurants you missed are fine. The energy you romanticized is just stress with better branding. You fly back to Miami and you feel the sun kiss your face, you love the humidity and your blood pressure drops back to chill. You rarely romanticize the old city the same way again.
Month 9: The Gaps You start noticing what isn’t there. There’s no dentist in Miami Shores. There’s no normal restaurant on 41st Street. There are no Jewish Deli in Miami worth eating. There’s no neighborhood bar in your neighborhood. In New York you assumed every category was saturated because every category was saturated. Here, entire industries are just missing. You start a note on your phone called “ideas.” It gets long. You realize the reason nothing is here isn’t that it can’t work, it’s that the people just don’t realize its missing. You did. You might be a genius. You start taking meetings.
Month 10: The Service Economy You slowly discover that Miami has quietly solved problems your old city never bothered with. Sudsies picks up your dry cleaning and returns way better than anyone in NYC. A man comes to your driveway and details your car for less than a carwash in Manhattan. When you get sick, a nurse comes to your bed with an IV, tests you for everything, bills your insurance, and leaves. You didn’t know this was a thing. You join a beach club. It’s where your family lives on weekends, where you take every visiting friend, where half your meetings happen. The one thing you can’t solve is a good doctor. There aren’t enough, the good ones are all concierge, and most of them are opening a med spa. You keep your guy in New York. You fly up once a year for the physical. Then he moves to Miami. G-d loves you.
Month 11: Assimilation You complain about the traffic, even though its nothing close to New York or LA rush hour. You know which causeway to take at which hour. You have a guy at Joe’s and got the VIP email for Major Food. You vow never to go back to Mila because your not a tourist, except maybe for brunch. You ask people where they are going this summer and read Whats Good Miami. You are, technically, a local now.
Month 12: The Taxes You do your taxes. There is no state income tax. You call your accountant. You say “are you sure?” He is sure. You sit in silence for a long moment.
Month 13: The Car You go to buy a car. You realize you don’t have to pay $800 a month for parking. You realize insurance and car payments are cheaper. You realize you can actually drive the car you always wanted. You buy it. You feel no guilt and you look great doing it.
Month 14: The Call For a year you’ve been trying to get into places. Then one day someone you barely know says “let me make a call.” An hour later you’re on the floor at the Heat arena. The next week someone else gets your construction permit unstuck, turns out his guy knows the commissioner’s guy, who knows the Cuban guy who stamps it. You stop trying to buy your way in. You start paying attention to who knows who. You realize the whole city runs on this. The real city is a group text you didn’t know existed. You start getting added to group texts.
Month 15: The Friends You talk a lot about missing your friends. Then your friends come visit. They’re better here. On vacation, on the boat, at dinner, they’re the people you fell in love with years ago. You realize you were never really hanging out with your friends back home. You were coexisting with their stress. You see them now for long weekends, at their best, and you love them more than you did when you lived in the same zip code. You keep the friendships. You lose the anxiety. Everyone wins.
