On a Short Winter Vacation, I'm Reveling in the Latin Quality of An Increasingly Unusual Resort Town

I am surrounded by Brazilian restaurants, Argentinian steakhouses, Peruvian grills. As I walk along a beachside boulevard, I pass Cuban groceries, and sidewalk cafes frequented by people reading books with Spanish-titles that I can easily see.

And where am I? I'm in Miami Beach, Florida, which has definitely become one of the most cosmopolitan cities in America. As I enjoy favorable January weather (daytime temperatures of 79 and 80 degrees), I am also responding happily to the novelty of a pervasive foreign culture.

Defying all the difficulties of obtaining American visas, a large number of newly prosperous Brazilians and Argentinians are flocking to this vacation center, occupying condominium apartments in the real estate developments that erupted onto Collins Avenue and in elegant Bar Harbour in the late 1990s and very early 2000s. Without them, the promoters of these residential complexes would be in bad trouble. What's even better is that our neighbors to the south are primarily choosing the U.S. summer months (which is winter in their climes) for their most popular time to visit, supplying off-season business to Miami Beach and at the same time creating this year-around infrastructure of new restaurants and shops. Plenty of Brazilians are here during our winter, but even more of them arrive in summer.

And so it was fairly to easy to consult the want ads on the Internet for an available condo in January. My wife and I are in a modern and extremely comfortable one-bedroom apartment facing the sea, at a reasonable price. We conducted the entire transaction of renting through the exchange of a few e-mails and a deposit easily made to the U.S. bank account of the foreign gentleman who rented us his condo. I simply strolled to the branch of the U.S. bank where he maintains his account, and deposited a check to it in a ten-minute effort.

Ensconced in our kitchen-equipped Miami Beach condo, we make breakfast for ourselves from the ingredients purchased from a nearby grocery, and we usually make lunch out of the salmon- or tunafish-filled bagels we've obtained from a nearby deli and stored in our refrigerator. For dinner, we go to one of those surprisingly-good South American restaurants, and make believe we're in Rio or Buenos Aires -- the experience is remarkably similar. We bathe in the heated swimming pool of our condo, or dip into the sea; we go power walking along the beach; we went to see Meryl Streep in Iron Lady last night; and on several occasions we've signed into yoga sessions made available by the operator of our condo or to engage in a form of aerobics called "Zamba" (all the rage in Florida -- a form of aerobics but to the beat of Latin dance rythms).

This may not strike you as much of an exotic vacation (we'll be traveling internationally next month), but it was reached in a flight of only two and a half hours, and the arrangements for it took only a few minutes. If you have a patronizing attitude towards a Florida beach vacation, or look upon it as a cop-out, you haven't been keeping up with the Latin invasion of one of our southernmost U.S. resort cities. Those Brazilians, Argentinians and Peruvians have made it into a colorful and interesting, Latin-style place.