My First Trip to the Sunshine State: A Filipino Immigrant Falls for Florida

Florida Before I’d Ever Been There

Before I moved to the United States in 2018, Florida wasn’t a blank space on a map to me. It was a feeling — built up over years of American music and Spanish telenovelas where glamorous characters were always escaping to Miami for vacation. Sunlight, palm trees, something dramatic happening on a boat. That was my Florida before I’d ever set foot in it.

Growing up in the Philippines, you absorb the United States through its exports long before you ever arrive. I knew California from the movies. I knew Las Vegas from every heist film ever made. And I knew Florida — or thought I did — from songs that name-dropped Miami like a shorthand for paradise.

Finally stepping off a plane and actually being there was one of those travel moments that arrives with its own specific weight. You’ve imagined a place so many times that the real version has to negotiate with all those imaginary versions. Florida, I’m happy to report, held its own.

Jacksonville as a Base — and Everything We Did from It

We stayed at a friend’s house in Jacksonville, which immediately changed how I experienced the city. When you’re a guest in someone’s home rather than a hotel room, you see a place the way they see it — the neighborhoods they actually live in, the grocery stores they go to, the roads they take on a Tuesday.

Jacksonville surprised me. It is enormous — the largest city by land area in the continental US, which nobody tells you before your first visit — and it has a relaxed, unhurried energy that I hadn’t expected from a major Florida city. The beaches nearby, particularly Jacksonville Beach, are the kind of uncrowded, uncomplicated stretches that remind you why people live here.

From there, we did what you do when you’re staying with people who know a place: we let them show us around.

St. Augustine was the first full day trip, and it became one of my favorite moments of the entire trip. Nothing in my telenovela education had prepared me for a city that old — founded in 1565, which puts it more than 200 years before the United States existed as a country. For someone raised in the Philippines, where Spanish colonial history is something you live inside every day, there was something oddly familiar about St. Augustine’s architecture and street patterns. The cobblestones, the heavy stone walls of Castillo de San Marcos, the Catholic churches — it felt like a conversation between two countries that both carry Spain somewhere in their bones.

I had Minorcan clam chowder in St. Augustine and it stopped me mid-conversation. Minorcan — from the settlers who came from the island of Menorca in the 18th century — is a tomato-based chowder with datil peppers, and it tastes like nothing else I’ve had in America. It is definitively local in a way that most American food is not. I am still thinking about it.

One afternoon we made the drive up to Georgia for St. Patrick’s Day. That was not on any itinerary I’d imagined for Florida, and yet: Florida is an hour from Georgia, and American holidays taken on the road with the right people have an energy all their own.

The Kennedy Space Center, Clearwater, and a Baseball Game

I want to be honest: I did not expect Cape Canaveral to hit me the way it did.

I am not an astronaut. I did not grow up watching rocket launches. But there is something about standing next to the actual Saturn V rocket — the one that took human beings to the moon — that bypasses all of that. It is simply too large and too improbable to remain emotionally neutral about. The scale of what those engineers and astronauts attempted, and the fact that it worked, is one of the genuinely astonishing things about the 20th century. You understand it differently when the rocket is in front of you.

Clearwater Beach came later in the trip and provided the Florida I had been picturing from the telenovelas — that impossibly fine white sand, the Gulf water warm and shallow and translucent, the kind of blue that makes you want to stop and verify it with your own hand. There are beaches in the Philippines that I love unreservedly, and I am not an easy person to impress with a beach. Clearwater impressed me.

We also caught a Red Sox spring training game in Fort Myers — another thing I had not expected to love and loved completely. Spring training baseball is baseball with the volume turned down. Smaller stadiums, warmer weather, players who are just finding their form for the season. You can get close enough to see the game actually happen rather than watching it through binoculars. I am now a person who goes to spring training, which is not something I would have predicted about myself before this trip.

The Food Was the Real Story

I have a principle I apply in every new place I visit: go where the locals go, not where the tourists end up. Florida tested this principle and rewarded it.

The Florida food story is genuinely underrated. People think of chain restaurants and theme park concessions, and they miss what is actually one of the most interesting culinary regions in the United States — shaped by Cuban immigration, Caribbean influence, fresh Gulf seafood, and a “Floribbean” fusion that takes tropical fruit and local fish and produces something that doesn’t quite exist anywhere else.

Billy’s Stone Crab — fresh-caught mahi-mahi and stone crab claws, simply prepared, the kind of seafood that requires no decoration because the quality does the work. In the Philippines, I grew up eating seafood that was hours from the ocean. Florida’s Gulf Coast seafood has that same quality: it tastes like where it came from.

Columbia Restaurant in Ybor City, Tampa — the oldest restaurant in Florida, opened in 1905, and still the definitive place for Cuban sandwiches and flamenco shows and black bean soup. Ybor City is Tampa’s historic Cuban and Spanish immigrant district, and Columbia is its anchor. The Cuban sandwich — slow-roasted pork, ham, Swiss, pickles, mustard, pressed until the bread is almost caramelized — is one of those regional American foods that deserves its reputation.

The catch of the day boards at Gulf Coast restaurants became a ritual. Whatever came in that morning, ordered as simply as possible. Grouper. Snapper. Flounder. Served with hush puppies and coleslaw and enough lemon to make it sing.

And Key lime pie — properly tart, not the sweet impostor versions that get labeled as such elsewhere. The real thing, made with actual Key limes, has an acidity that cuts through the richness of the custard and makes you understand why it became the state dessert. I had it at multiple stops before admitting I was conducting an unofficial survey.

What Florida Proved to Me

I came to Florida with a picture in my head assembled from songs and telenovelas — sun, drama, escapism, a certain cinematic glamour.

What I found was that, and also something more textured and surprising. The history embedded in St. Augustine’s old city. The genuine awe of standing next to a machine that went to the moon. The specific pleasure of a stone crab claw cracked open at a table ten feet from the water. The company of friends who knew where to take you and were generous enough to take you there.

Florida proved to be every bit as vibrant as the stories I heard growing up. It just turned out to be vibrant in ways I hadn’t imagined — which is the best possible outcome for a first trip anywhere.

I have been back since. I will go back again.

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