The One With The Missing Fin

 

Flying Time

It’s been another week, and time is going insanely fast. I left home 20 days ago, how crazy is that? 20 days = 480 hours = 28 800 minutes = 1 728 000 seconds. That’s a lot of seconds!

I dare you to count to 1 728 000. Wanna bet it’s gonna take you 20 days?

Anyway, taking a nap two times a day makes time fly, but so does having fun. I don’t even have time to take ONE nap a day, let alone two. Not that I mind though. I could take some days off and go see a little of Mexico, which does sound good … But then again, so does diving. Eventually I end up choosing to dive every day. Does that make me lazy or passionate?

Busy Bee

Like I said, I don’t have time for naps. You could say that I’ve been busy, or something remotely close to that. I leave the hostel every day at 07h30. Once at the dive shop, I make sure my gear is all ready to head out on the first dive of the day. When the customers come in, I set up their gear as well: get them a BCD (the “jacket” connected to the tank that makes you float), a regulator (the thing connected to the tank which keeps you alive: you breath through it), fins, a mask and a wetsuit (the thing you wear and pee in).

In the afternoon I usually study and go to bed early. Diving is exhausting, holy guacemoly. According to google, I burn 300 calories an hour. And as you can read, all my worries disappear in the water. Living in the sunny, beachy Playa Del Carmen has got me so stressed out. Thank god I have diving, or I’d be lost living a horrible life here. 

Fin

Before I go into the fun things of my week, I have an important message:

Mojito Night

I’ve been trying to get my book finished so I could finally ……. start the second book. Not even kidding, there’s a second book. Anyway, on Wednesdaynight I FINALLY finished studying. I figured I could celebrate a teeny tiny bit so I joined in on the Mojito Night. It’s a weekly event at the hostel: an hour of making as many mojitos as you possibly can. Most people get insanely drunk. It’s like a competition with yourself: how many Mojitos can I drink before I pass out?

Naturally I wasn’t one of those people, since I’m very responsible grown up. There was this one British guy, let’s call him Adam, who completely went for it. He’d been kind of weird the days before: staring at me, sitting really close to me, coming over to me while I was playing a game because he thought I was asking for him to come over, … You know, what British people do. Anyway, after 10 Mojitos he got even weirder. Imagine this: I wanted to go sit down with some people after the mojito-making so I start walking over to the benches. Adam grabs my hand, so I look up at him and ask him if he’s mistaking me for his mom and since we’re not crossing the street, why he would hold his mom’s hand in public like that. He got really insulted and walked away. I think he’s still embarrassed because he’s been ignoring me the last two days. Sorry not sorry, bro.

Thanksgiving

America has this weird holiday: Thanksgiving. Wish we got a day off to celebrate “being thankful”. Just because it’s a really weird holiday, doesn’t mean I, as a Dutchie, can’t celebrate, right?

So as you can see, we had a celebration at the hostel. There were six of us and we decided to go all out on the “cooking” part: we made a salad. It even had cucumbers and carrots in it. We even bought tomatoes, but since tomatoes are the devil in foodform, we decided to leave them out of the salad and put them on the side. You know, so people from hell could have some tomatoes. We got breadrolls and cake too, just because we’re nice people. Others did go crazy on the cooking: there were roasted veggies, a potato salad, bruchettas, … Our salad was hardly touched. It broke my heart.

All the food great. And I really needed it. It was the day I lost Fin. My life will never be the same.

Diving

Yes, even this week I went diving. LOOOOOOTS of diving. I almost feel like an addict. Then again, there’s worse things to be addicted to. Or is saying something like that one of the signs of addiction?

This week was amazing. It started out with a sharkdive. More bullsharks for me. You’d think I might get bored with it. Not a chance. The second we hit the bottom, they were surrounding us. I think they were looking for a nice piece of Fi to eat. Everybody know I’m yum. Can you see the shark in the background?! CAN YOU SEE IT? Exactly, it was amazing.

So during the week I helped out on some courses. I helped out on an open water course first. It practically means I get to demonstrate all the skills they need to learn and that I’m an extra set of hands just in case. We went to the pool first, which was freezing. I’m thinking of getting a 5 mm wetsuit. It’s just not worth it to be cold all the time. After the pool we go on 4 dives (not all in one day). During every dive the student has to demonstrate some of the skills, to make sure they got them under the knee (makethatthecatwise).

After the open water course, I got to guide certified divers for the first time. It’s hard to keep track of everyone AND keep track of their air-use AND make sure they stick together. I’m Super Woman though, so I can do anything.

The day after I got to “assist” on an advanced course. This means I didn’t do ANYTHING at all, just keep an eye on everyone. For the advanced course, the students choose five types of dives. The ones they chose this week were: navigation dive, drift diving, deep diving, night diving, peak performance buoyancy dive. I’ll just tell you about the night dive, the rest is pretty straight forward.

So, we went out around 19h00, around the time the sun sets. By the time everybody’s geared up and in the water, the sun is down. You might be wondering: why go diving at night? There’s a lot of life in the ocean that doesn’t like the sunlight, so they come out at night: crabs, green moray eels, octopus, … Can you imagine not liking the sunlight and having a bunch of divers shining their lights on you? Oops, sorry. Anyway, we got to see three turtles, octopus, crabs, moray eels, … It was an awesome dive.

 

Soup

The only thing I don’t have here is soup. So I’ve been devastated. There’s no mixer + I’d have to buy a big jug of water because the water in Mexico isn’t great for drinking. You could try, but I’m not sure you’d live long. Anyway, I’ve been looking for a good place with soup AND I FOUND IT! After all the the pictures my dad sent me of his soup, I can finally say THAT I HAVE SOUP! I did have a picture of it, but it seems to have disappeared. AND, I don’t care enough to keep looking for it.

Peace out brethren, I’m gonna go get me some soup.

 

Write you soon

Fi

 

PS: Gian chose the song of the week. It’s in German, so I’m going on blind trust here. I already feel like it was a bad choice