an overview of the mall
Originally uploaded by Daniel de Aguirres

Regardless all pleasures and treasures travels can yield, setting off to another country and spending time in another soil that is not yours remains a challenge. The food, the culture, the weather, the currency and the language pose as the greatest threats to a successful international experience. To say one had a great time overseas, at least two of the items above must be personally tamed.
And there’s the air flight, which is the one that most scares me out. I don’t like flying. I know, according to the average number of airplanes accidents per year, flying is really safe. The odds are that you might be more probably killed by a lightning than by a plane crash. But numbers are numbers and when you’re sweating thousands of feet above the ground statistics are as irrelevant and negligible as the scores of a baseball match for me.
My last journey to Las Vegas in June was nothing but agonizing. Ironically, it seemed I was the only one who couldn’t relax and “enjoy the ride”. That I guess because I was the only one, as far as I was concerned, who couldn’t stop looking through a gigantic storm passing close through the aircraft in the skies of south Texas – later I came to know that was a “mild” hurricane, in fact. Inside those massive huge clouds I could see lightning destructive enough to split the airplane in two in the twinkling of an eye. The whole thing made pray incessantly for many minutes. I know pilots are smart and adapt to avoid thunderstorms, tornados, etc. but what if the stuff is so intense and big that there’s no way through?
We eventually arrived in Brazil safely and I didn’t forget to thank God for his mercy.
Back home, checking my e-mails and among them some inevitable spams, I saw a few ads of cruises and ship trips. I imagined how cool it’d be if I could go back to the US next time on a fast ship, an imaginary one that could lead passengers all the way from SP to Dallas in 10 hours just as the airplane does. Then I remembered that lightning and thunderstorm can strike maritime vessels too…