Like most right-thinking....er, correct-thinking Americans, I've watched countless news reports from Florida with revulsion. It seems as though every terrible bath-salts-induced crime or can't-look-away spousal abuse story takes place in Florida, somehow, and so I thought this trip—my first time ever setting foot in Florida, despite many road trips through the south—would be nightmarish for reasons above and beyond the convention. I was expecting the worst from Tampa. But I like what I've seen so far. The mayor and city council are all, famously, Democrats, and the people are very nice. Way nicer to strangers than Seattle. Or Maine, where I'm from originally, or Iowa. And I'm taking the bus everywhere, so of course I've seen some sights (I don't know what kind of powder that one guy kept rubbing into his gums as he sat next to me on the bus this morning, but I have my suspicions), but it's all stuff you'd see on the bus in Seattle, too. And while it's very sprawl-y—getting around without a car is proving to be a huge problem—the bungalows and small houses are charming and not at all off-putting. It's a modest sprawl, with distinct neighborhoods and strong identities. I'm staying in Seminole Heights, which is full of working class families and young couples.

But it's impossible for me to definitively say if I would want to come back to Tampa for a vacation or anything like that. It's like meeting someone who could have become your best friend if you hadn't met them on the worst day of their lives. The downtown is a militarized zone, with streets blocked off and packs of cops walking and driving through in tight formation. Secret Service agents stand in intersections, wearing bulletproof vests. Helicopters are always hovering overhead, giving the streets a nervous feel. There are lots of machine guns and dump trucks sealing off streets and barricades in the middle of avenues. I was trying to make my way to a protest at the headquarters for Outback Steakhouse, which is controlled by Bain Capital, and the buses were completely sidetracked by the ever-enlarging security net. Because of unexpected protests downtown, police have expanded the bubble out past the downtown core, angering drivers far to the north and south of the convention center.

And the sky is petulant and vicious, firing down spouts of water directly at the streets. One downpour was so sudden and intense that it drove protesters under an awning. I couldn't have gotten any wetter if I had jumped directly in the Hillsborough River. This evening, the loud, friendly bar I was eating in grew silent when a patron's phone made the piercing sound of a tornado warning. Even when it's not raining—which is most of the time—stepping out from air conditioning into the humidity makes my glasses steam up immediately and my lungs tense up with the panicked feeling of drowning.

I think that somewhere under all this angry noise and atrocious weather, there's a genuinely sweet, laid-back city to enjoy. Too bad I'm never going to see it.