All the cities of the world have several faces: the happy face, the beautiful one, the prosperous one, the depressed, the dark, the ugly, the poor, the rich, the impenetrable, there are many ways of seeing and understanding a city.
I have lived in Orlando for six years; I have tried to get around the city and get to know it (I still have a long way to go). Today I will talk about a segment on the Orange Blossom Trail (OBT) between Skyview drive and 34th St., on a Monday in August 2023, at 9 a.m.
OBT is a very interesting mixture of cultures, the spices from the Caribbean merge with the Indians, the Egyptians and the Latinas, one walks the avenue and fills his eyes with advertisements for used car sales, empty places waiting for the night, many stores of pawnbrokers, pieces of billboards that barely announce a telephone number that one should call but do not know who or why, gas stations that are skeletons, closed stores that still keep objects in their windows, organized and shining, as if they were seeing me and not the other way around, small shopping centers with reading services about the future and some advice for life, buildings that were once perhaps hotels with good architectural taste converted into shelters for people who go out into the street with their vehicle: A broken grocery cart that is sometimes full, but many times empty.
In a corner a man is kneeling begging for money, and I remember Venezuela in 2017, when inflation led many people to starve. This is a very sad memory.
On the street I saw other human beings who seem to be dragging the night before,
as if their clothes were too big for them or that they rolled over their bodies while they slept.
At 9 in the morning this segment of OBT is still waking up, stretching their arms, yawning, waiting for the big trucks that will use the street to move anything from south to north and vice versa to pass by and make noise and blow horns and form traffic and help those still sleeping eyes, to open.
Gisela Romero is an American Visual Artist born in Venezuela, living, and working in Orlando, Florida. Her focus is on Drawing in multiple formats and surfaces. Check out her work at giselaromeroart.com.