MOLI VIEW™

Yesterday I was complaining to my friend Laura Quinlan that I hadn't been out of the country in a couple years. "You live outside the country," Laura said. "Just go to your local supermarket [Bay], and you'll feel like you're in Latin America."

It's true: I can eat at one of the little luncheonettes across from Bay and, from its aroma of onions and beans and cilantro to its ragged furniture, feel exactly as I've felt in Puerto Rico, or on any Caribbean island. Fans barely keep the tropical air moving, and I'll be lucky if the waiter speaks English. It's one of the running jokes about Miami: "It's such an interesting city, and so close to the U.S."

I lived in the East Village a dozen years before I moved to Miami Beach in 2001, and there's a worldly electric buzz about New York that I will always miss, and relive in my dreams. But for all the cultural mix that I enjoyed in the subway and Central Park, in Miami, I deal daily with people from other parts of the world to a degree I never did in Manhattan. As I've written before, rappers call it da Bottom, but for southern hemisphere dwellers, it's the top of Latin America. Europeans love us, and you'd be surprised at the number of Asian communities there are in Miami.

That said, there are days I feel like I'm in the middle of nowhere. The average musical tour stays hours away, if it ventures into Florida at all. There's no dedicated indie cinema. If I didn't belong to a book club, I could go weeks without discussing literature. Thank god I get The New York Times delivered daily.

Previous Page  1  2  3  Next Page