Miami: A Turd Next to a Phone booth.... a $3 Coffee

Miami, as the obviously-gay man on the bus to boston described it, is a "sexy" city. One would never know that Boston is of similar size when Miami is so full of towering, glass-filled, balcony-burdened buildings. Miami has an Urban populace of ~5 million (8th largest in the U.S.... Boston is 10th), and when I first arrived here, it took two hours to hear my first word of English.
Lea Stagno (pronounced "staño" like "estaño", the spanish word for "tin", an exploited resource of Brasil), picked me up from the airport. She and her husband, Agustin, live on the 26th (the top floor) near or in midtown Miami (see below for photos). Lea is small and welcoming and very pretty. Her husband makes me laugh. Agustin always scolds me for being concerned with trivial matters. When I woke today, he was standing nearby, packing for our trip in the morning. I said "Qué hora es?" and his reply was that I should not worry of such things, and that I should only concern myself with the cycles of the Sun and the Moon.
They have also served to excite me immensely. They're love of Venezuela is palpable. They talk of the food as though it were a child, embellishing it's merits. The landscape of venezuela they described as "god's canvass" where he decided to put the entirety of his favorite things within the confines of a single country. Best of all, they both seem to feel that Mérida is the greatest city in Venezuela, though the people of Caracas consider it, as they apparently do with all "gente del interior", a town of simple people. A small town of 300,000 people (Portland, Me = 66,000 people). Finally, I went out with Lea for a drink near an art gallery where we tried and failed to enter without a V.I.P pass. I met a small group of Venezuelans she considers friends. One each from Maracaibo, Valencia, and Caracas. I somehow managed to dance in a room full of idle folk for most of the evening; a trait, I learned, that is typical of my cousin. Somehow these things stick ever so tightly to our DNA.

Pun of the Day: "I really do prefer the open air markets. Compared to the grocer, they can really seem Bazaar."

La Frase del Día: -"No Entiendo un Carajo".....gracias LuLu.