The sweltering afternoon gave way to a hot evening yesterday.
Smoke billowed across the road, big clouds choking tall trees, from fires that burned on the streetside curb.
Swarms of people - fussed, screamed, laughed, ran.
There were explosions in the sky, cracks and bangs sounding like gunshots. Children squealed.
Police sirens wailed, flashing lights, fire engines whining.
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Voices, speaking French and English, from all over Africa.
Other immigrants too from mysterious lands with strange languages.
To the uninformed eye (and ear) this scene was truly the apocalypse.
It could have been Johannesburg, my city at the end of the world.
It was in fact, July 4 in a New York City park.
The smoke and fire? That's a thousand barbecue grills.
The explosions? Independence Day fireworks.
The police sirens? A kid had gotten lost. The cops were trying to locate his parents.
The Africans? The Caribbeans? They're the neighbours, all celebrating America's Big Day.
Squint your eyes a little and it could have been the end of the world.
But open them and it was one big party.
Perception is everything, not just in Brooklyn but also South Africa.
I'd arrived back in New York from Johannesburg a few days earlier after spending five weeks in and around the World Cup.
On one of my last days in the host country, I'd stopped my car at a traffic light near Johannesburg's downtown and, as I'd become accustomed to, been approached by the usual street vendors and beggars asking on the other side of the windscreen if I wanted to buy something.
I had little interest in (another vuvuzela) or could offer spare change or food. This time, however, things were slightly different.
One of the men approaching the car was white (this is very unusual) and he insisted on tapping on the window.
“It's OK,” he insisted. “I'm not a hijacker.”
Well, that's alright then.
In over 30 days in South Africa this was the closest I had come – a guy looking for money to probably buy drugs - to personal danger in a country where, had I heeded all earlier warnings, I would not have even checked airline ticket prices earlier in the year, let alone taken a flight and actually travelled to the country.
In a nation which apparently has one of the highest rape and murder rates in the world I seemed to have dodged every bullet on the market.
Was I lucky? Did FIFA's invasion prompt local authorities to lock up potential bad guys for a month? Did I spend my time in a bubble away from the real South Africa? Were the dangers exaggerated? Do I look like I have nothing worth stealing?
Possibly all of the above but – equally - I also met some of the friendliest people in the world in South Africa, the most welcoming, and most polite, even when what should be the simplest daily task (taking a bus across town) become a disastrous disorganised shambles.
After being asked where I was from, the next most popular question from people of all races would be “Do you like South Africa?” and “Will you return?”
The answer to both is, hopefully, yes.
One reason being because a World Cup doesn't show you what a country is really like, for better and worse.
As the South African writer Rian Milan wrote: “Foreigners think we're nuts, coming back to a doomed city on a damned continent but there's something you don't understand: it's boring where you are.”
He's right. Except maybe on July 4.
