Venezuelan living in Miami: Is that a good or bad thing?

I will start-off my blog saying that the process of leaving home for Venezuelans is not easy. However, once you begin your journey overseas, a new story begins, and you experience a unique adventure that has its pros and cons, like in Miami. This city is both a nice place and not that nice place to live for a Venezuelan. Let's see why:

Let's start with the pros.

1) Miami is home!

Living in Southern Florida, specially in Miami, just feels like living in El Cafetal (Caracas' neighborhood). According to the website Culture Mapped, there are near 50,000 Venezuelan residents just in the Miami-Dade County. Nearly half of my building residents are Venezuelan and you can feel everywhere their noise and sazón (word that we use in Spanish to refer to a unique characteristic). You'll never feel completely alone here. Why? Venezuelans look for Venezuelans, and we find a way to come-up together to create a fun group of friends.

Image of Venezuelan protest in Miami from babalublog.com

2) Arepas are following you

I have counted by myself 9 Venezuelan-food restaurants around the Miami metropolitan area, and I'm sure there are even more. For me, an Arepa or Cachapa tastes better here than in Venezuela. The best restaurant? Budare Bistro. You'll experience the best cachapa ever over there.

Image of Budare Bistro from descubremiami.com

3) Visitors come here all year long

Miami feels even closer to Venezuela when you notice that most of the time you have friends and family around here that actually live somewhere else. Physical proximity, its different shopping centers and its Venezuelan influence make of Miami a convenient place to visit. You'll always have friends that doesn't live here that'll tell you to go clubbing because they want to experience the authentic Miami life. Even if you don't want to go because you are tired of those parties, you always end-up taking them.

4) Miss dancing reggaeton? Not a problem!

It doesn't matter if you feel nostalgic about dancing reggaeton in nightclubs like you used to do in Venezuela. Most of nightclubs here play this seductive genre and you will see how people go crazy perreando (type of twerking).

Once the pros were mentioned, let's talk about the cons of living in Miami.

1) You barely use your English

Since Miami has an important hispanic population, here basically everybody speaks Spanish. You think it is frustrating trying to speak English and even though people reply to you in Spanish because of your accent? Don't worry, it happens to me all the time too. However, try to speak English as much as possible, otherwise you will feel you are losing it.

A sign saying in Spanish: We speak Spanish. Image from www.key-wordsuggestions.com

2) Miami is not really U.S.A.

Many people here are from somewhere else. For this reason, you don't really experience the American culture, so if what you are looking for is to live at an authentic American place, you should find another city. What you actually experience here is a melting-pot culture, which is not bad, but it's just not American.

Image of Ultra Music Festival, where people from everywhere join together. Image from turistaenmiami.com

3) What an expensive place!

According to Numbeo Website, the average cost of living for a single person in Miami up to October 2016 is 974.92$. For a Venezuelan, these numbers may be frightening if we take into account that exchanging Bolivares (Venezuelan currency) for dollars is extremely expensive. One dollar is equal to 1,200 Bolivares. Imagine that pain.

4) You don't leave your comfort zone

Despite the cons, this city is still a convenient place to live for a Venezuelan. For this reason, we feel comfortable and most of us don't have a real struggle getting used to the city. However, this might become a problem if someday we decide to live in a different city or country. There's no place out of Venezuela more Venezuelan than Miami, cheers for that! But imagine ourselves trying to adapt to the German or Japanese culture, for example. The struggle would be so real.

References

- www.culturemapped.com

- babalublog.com

- descubremiami.com

- turistaenmiami.com

- www.numbeo.com