Dancing with Dominicans

Sao Paulo was staggering to say the least. I was struck on my fight into the city at how the city spread as a net of lights as far as the eye could see out of the tiny plane window. Many cities are large and light but Sao Paulo was striking.
Carol took me to the top of one of Sao Paulo's towers that had a view of the entire city. Immediately Sao Paulo's status as one of the largest cities in the world was established. I thought my standards of "big city" were established by Manhattan's tall bussiness district but Sao Paulo has forever shrunk New York in my mind. From the top of the tower buildings rose up in every direction. The tower gave a 360 degree view of downtown Manhattan, the merge of 10 city's downtowns. Everywhere we went the streets were full of people and the downtown metro stations (surprisingly clean) at 11am were busier than the Time Square metro at 5pm. My standards of big city have been reset, until I visit Tokyo.
I spent a sleepless night trying to decide whether to stay or return home but left Sao Paulo Saturday while holding back tears. My final memory of Brazil will be of running to another terminal to buy coffee. The single cafe in our terminal had a broken coffee maker but I couldn't leave without one more glorious Brazilian coffee so, to remain in a secured area, I had to run to a cafe in the next terminal to buy coffee. In departing depression I bought two and ran between terminals "double fisting it," coffee in one hand and cappacino in the other.
After many hours of surfing various states of conciousness, our plane circled Miami- Little Havana. After the Sao Paulo, I had to stifle chuckles "that's a city; that tiny thing?!" All flights to the northeast US were cancled for weather so now I am visiting Miami for three days.
In the sketchiest manner possible, I met a couple of guys from the Dominican Republic at a resturant near my hotel. They invited me to a street festival where we met more their friends, more Dominicans, and were surrounded by latin America. I am amused that I went from lingual isolation with Portuguese to lingual isolation with Spanish.

I would comment on the festival now (especially as the representation of masulinity was very interesting) but I am being shuffled around between about 5 guys and the time to change hands again has come.