Rebecca Kukla: belief

Transcript context

…Is Tampa, Florida, underrated? Yes, it’s certainly underrated. Tampa’s another really complicated city. I lived there for several years. I think a lot of people go to Tampa, and they either go there for business and end up in the suburbs of these corporate business parks that are terrible, or they have retired relatives around there who are living in gated communities that are terrible, or they go to the beach, which is whatever it is. It’s the same as the beach everywhere in this country. But if you actually go into the center of Tampa, into inner city Tampa, it’s an incredibly distinctive city. It has a long history as a center of labor activism. It’s incredibly racially diverse. It was a cigar city originally, and it’s filled with Cubans and Central Americans and Caribbeans and also Romanians and Jews and Italians and Spanish folks, and they all came together, and they all created this distinctive Tampa culture that actually really has its own food and its own music, which is just a mixture of all of these things. And when you’re in the middle of Tampa you almost feel like you’re in a different country. It’s so lush, and it’s so weird, and it’s so not organized. There’s almost no city planning there whatsoever. So you’re in this city, and you’re in the middle of a business district, but there will be chickens walking by, and there will be water birds wandering across your path, and there will be geckos climbing up things. It’s all very tropical and exotic and evocative, and at the same time it has this really vibrant culture on the ground that almost nobody knows about because when they think of Tampa, they just think of this sort of bland city that you get around the edges. I think not only is it underrated, but it’s really hidden and underexplored. It’s one of the few spots in the States that I feel has not really been mined yet compared to other urban areas. How do you figure out where to eat in Washington, DC, where you live?…

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