A party for tourists but not for the locals

South Beach is not Miami. It's a tourist resort with junk-heaped overpriced shops, elaborate hotels with menial laborers and women competing to spend more wearing less.

It's an oasis from reality, an overpriced fairy tale for spring breakers, romancers and the elderly.

But it's not Miami.

I've always been told that Baltimore is one of the crappiest cities. But Miami is not only crappy -- it's hypocritical too.?I was there for only a week during spring break, but I saw flashes of poverty, of the real working living Miami, beneath the shoddy extravagance of the city's celebrities and tourists.

I think cities are moving and fascinating, like people.?I'm a Marylander, and I love Baltimore -- I see in it a city of the past, a city that has to remember its heyday because its present is so harsh.?In Miami, I saw a city sucked dry by celebrities and tourists, full of people floundering in poverty to support others' parasitic opulence.

It's been a year since I vacationed there, and Miami has become a set of impressions in my memory, small incidents that represent the whole.

Even the taxi ride from the airport to South Beach was a lesson and a memory.?The taxi driver -- a stumpy, hairy man with speckled grey hair and a rolling Latino accent -- chattered about politics and Bush and war -- he knew more about foreign relations than most Hopkins students.?He seemed eager to push his expertise, so when I tried to make a comment, he sometimes interrupted me to reassert his opinion.

He had a PhD.? He was from Latin America ... I forget which county.?And he was only a taxi driver.

You can't find jobs in Miami, he said. This city's for tourists and the wealthy.

After he left me at the hotel, I relaxed for several days in South Beach, which seemed to me -- a small town girl -- like a southern Manhattan, a sort of embodiment of that liberal term "conscpicous consumption."?I had wine at outdoor restaurants, wore a new skirt every day and lounged on the beach.?

But even at the hotel, the superficiality was broken by reality. As I enjoyed my youth at the hotel pool, an elderly woman shuffled by in her one-piece swimsuit.?She wandered up to vacationers like a cat seeking attention and found two other women in their 50s whom she called "children."

I listened to her talk, interested by her amused outrage at young people's rudeness.? The 50 year-old asked her what she does now that she doesn't work.

I travel, she said.? I've been to Europe, to South America ... almost everywhere.?I travel alone since my husband died.?I've been here now almost a month.

Alone? Asked the woman.

Yes, but you meet interesting people.?I haven't been lonely.

Her voice was softer as she said that -- staying at a hotel where people come and go every seven days or so.?Even on South Beach, people grapple with age and death and loneliness, and in the woman's case, she was trying to find happiness in other people's happiness, not realizing that it wasn't happiness but superficiality.

When I left South Beach and escaped the wealthy, or pseudo wealthy, vacationers - that's where I learned the most.?I took a tour of Miami.

Our bus -- crammed with foreigners and Americans, young and old, married and dating -- passed the homes of celebrities, the strip malls, the Cuban and cultural areas of Miami.?We saw whole islands owned by actors, neighborhoods designed to look like English tudor houses and homes that looked like mansions.??

When he wasn't on the microphone for the official tour, the tour guide told another story of Miami.?He said if you weren't rich, Miami could be a dirt heap.

Jobs are scarce, housing poor and even the most qualified could only find work, for example, as a tour guide.?He said he lived in a dump, and I thought of the contrast: leading tours of celebrity vacation houses while he could barely get by.

My memories of spring break are short and stilted, but they were about more than just a relaxing vacation.