Poetic Revery in Clouds

Begin exchange year journal:
My entire flight day was very relaxed, and I spent a lot of time reading and waiting. I never saw a single exchange student the entire day, either. I slept through my flight to Dallas and most of my flight to Mexico City, but saw a few damned impressive clouds. It is a real dream fulfillment to fly for the first time after falling in love with clouds.

A summary of basic information before we begin. I am leaving from Detroit, to Dallas, to Mexico City, to Minatitlan, Veracruz, Mexico. I am here for 11 months on a Rotary Youth Exchange. I will live with three separate families. My first host family, the Daza family, consists of Pedro and Lety, my parents, and Pedro (14) and Erick (18) my host brothers. I am in this house because Erick is leaving on Exchange in Turkey for a year on September 16 approximately. I attend a private high school of about 100 students, called Colegio Nuevo Hispano. We have uniforms and hair regulations and very very nice students. Minatitlan, or Mina, is a fairly large town of about 150,000 people. We are also about 20 minutes by highway from Coatzacoalcos, or Coatza, which is on the gulf and is a moderately important port, of about 234,000 people. Coatza is where we go for American conveniences like shopping malls and Subway and the Home Depot. The economy of both Mina and Coatza depend on Pemex, the Mexican National petroleum company, which is where my host dad works. There are two entire refineries in Mina and more in Coatza, I believe. As Rotary exchange students, we attend Rotary Club meetings every week, help with Rotary functions and fundraisers, and recieve $75 every month. That should explain about everything I can think of now, but please ask if you're ever lost or something. I don't mind a bit.

In the Dallas airport I read most of and finished Off the Map, the Crimethinc. travelogue of Europe. Off the Map is how I would like my journals to sound. I found this wonderful quote in it:

¨I realized then, that the nature of magic is not passing by. Under the waning moon, everything was suddenly steeped in profound and mystic meaning. I was no mosquito-bitten traveler stealing past tattletale farm dogs to sleep in a borrowed field; no, I was a student of life´s poetry, deep in the throes of epiphany. And the glowbug was an undercover philosophy teacher, reminding me that magic isn´t something that happens only once in a while, when someone is really lucky. It´s up to us if we stay awake watching it or fall asleep lulled by it. It´s up to us to trust that it´s real, and if we do, a whole world opens up for us to live in, not in place of irritating dogs and hungry mosquitoes, but right alongside them and within them.
As I laid there staring at the ole glowbug I couldn´t believe I´d ever had moments of blindness to magic, let alone days and weeks and years. I was certain, in that late hour of contentment before I fell asleep in soggy socks and damp overalls, that the imprint of the glowbug would last forever, that never again would I live outside such enchantment as was mine for the claiming. It was with the assurance of fresh revelations that I finally gave myself over to dreaming, the glowbug still inching over the ridges of my mind, in no hurry to reach the morning.¨

Mexico City is impossibly huge. When you come in over it in the airplane, it stretches as far as you can see, and further. Well over half the size of Tuscola County at 578 Sq Miles (compared to 914 in Tuscola County). From the airport, the sky looked this awful gray-blue color and you couldn't tell where the mountain sillouhettes ended and the sky began. Leaving Mexico City we got to fly through some clouds in a real way for the first time. On the previous two flights we just flew straight above the clouds line. That was great and I love seeing cloud landscapes and countrysides, but this time we spent maybe 15 minutes flying through the best clouds, at sunset. Sunset gives all the clouds a beautiful orange-yellow glow. I also wish I were a cloud peasant, so I cloud live among the cloud palaces all the time and wander the cloud countryside. This departing cloudscape over Mexico City was very populous and had a lot of huge palaces and castles. I had a perfect moment listening to "I have been floated," and then "Hoppipola."

A poem:
There are mountains here, small and green.
Those in the clouds are huge and white and wispy.

Love,
Adam