A“Working is only for people who can’t fish and have to buy their dinner at the supermarket,” says Bill, who, like his friend John, has long since retired but is still fit and a passionate angler. Both of them are sitting on their folding chairs at the City Pier on Anna Maria Island, and just as John is reeling in his line, four dolphins glide through the water, less than 50 meters from the pier. “I wonder why people flock to the water parks and spend $50 or more to see dolphins. They pass by every day, completely naturally, with all their elegance and free of charge.” Bill nods in agreement and adds that sometimes manatees, the huge, endangered sea cows, also appear. They are more common on Florida’s Gulf Coast than anywhere else on earth. “They splash around on the pier for a bit with their 400 to 500 kilograms of weight and then dive down again as if weightless.”

The American state of Florida is almost half the size of Germany, so it’s bigger than many people might think and therefore more different than you would think. The Gulf Coast, which includes Anna Maria Island, has little in common with the Atlantic side and central Florida. On the Gulf of Mexico there is a Florida without mice and Miami, without action and art deco, without make-up and theme parks. It’s a corner of Florida that’s easy and casual, and Anna Maria Island seems a little more removed from the realities of America than the rest of the West Coast. The three-story houses with their pastel colors seem, like almost everything on this island, like the motifs in a cheerful painting, like an exclave in the middle of the often gray dreariness of everyday American life.

Sometimes you even think that everything here is a little too nice. There are no high-rise buildings, no hotel complexes, no stress, no traffic jams. The pace on the island is based on the speed of golf carts and bicycles. Small boutiques are taking a stand against the interchangeable branches of large chains. There aren’t even the usual fast food suspects, no Mac Donalds, no Kentucky Fried Chicken. Instead, the municipality has created herb and vegetable gardens that everyone can help themselves to for free. Even the simplest buildings look so perfect, as if they had been modeled specifically for an ideal world setting – like those from “The Truman Show”, the 1998 comedy in which the insurance clerk Truman Burbank – without knowing it – He is the main actor in a TV series in which his entire life has been presented live on television since his birth.