My Arrival

I arrived in the Mexico City airport on Oct. 25th. Mexico City, or the "D.F." as it´s known colloquially in Cuernavaca, is the world´s largest city, and after flying over the city I don´t doubt it. It absolutely extends as far as the eye can see, stretching over mountains and the entire expanse of the vast valley formed by those mountains. Sadly, from the plane I could also see a thick layer of yellow-brown smog that perpertually hangs over the city. I could even smell it as the plane decended through the smog cloud - yea, gross.

My "supervisor", Kathy, came to pick me up at the airport and take me to Cuernavaca - an hour´s bus ride. I put supervisor in quotes because she greeted me with a big hug, and we live in the same complex, so she´s more or less adopted me as family. We arrived in Cuernavaca around 7:30 pm (the time difference is only an hour or so). I got settled in and we ordered pizza for dinner (a very traditional Mexican dish). After eating and talking a bit, we called it a day, and that was Day 1.

For those of you, like me, who are feeling-, rather than fact-oriented people, I´ll recount a bit of how I was feeling during that first day. For starters, I had to say good-bye to my Mom and my youngest sister at the airport and that royally sucked - to put it bluntly. At that point, I was ready to turn around. I had a great summer in my home city, Cincinnati, and in the few weeks before I left, I had realized what I was leaving behind, and I very quickly lost interest in moving for a year to a foreign place with a foreign language and foreign people. Honestly, the morning that I left, and especially during the preceding days, I was not even the slightest bit excited to go. So I was pretty grumpy while on my first plane to Houston. Fortunately, my attitude began to change slightly on the flight from Houston to Cuernavaca. I wouldn´t say I started to look forward to arriving, but at least I didn´t dread the experience. Once the plane hit ground in Mexico, I had fewer and fewer negative thoughts running through my head, and that horrible gut feeling that I had made a big mistake finally started to subside. The hug from Kathy helped a lot, and as the day came to an end, I became increasingly curious, even little excited, to explore my new surroundings.