I'm Back

HI!
well, i've decided to restart my blog. i realize it was started for mexico and my mexico postings were entirely unsatisfactory, but life goes on.

First, i believe i should put a nice cap on Mexico.
ahh mexico. I really truly loved my life in Mexico. The first three months were such a fantastic time of learning and hanging out and having fun on a private beach with 29 or so brittish and american peers. I learned about coral, science, cooking, spanish, brittish, and TEFL. Also i became accomplished at shaving in a bucket, showering once every 4 days for about 10 minutes under a single stream of freezing water in a dark stall, shampooing in a bucket, flushing with a bucket, doing laundry with only one alloted bucket of semi-fresh mangrove water (before you think it's tooo gross, it's also the water we used to wash dishes), wearing a sarong, and climbing into and out of a mosquito net covered top bunk while keeping out sand (difficult when the floor is the beach...). I was sad to leave Punta Gruesa, and would have considered applying to be a scholar if the timing was different.

The second three months were many things. WONDERFUL - diving up to three times a day every day in idyllic reefscapes with massive fish, huge healthy corals, and many turtles and eagle rays. EMPOWERING - learning what it means to be a Divemaster, learning more than i ever thought i'd know about diving science, fine tuning my dive and rescue skills, and finally working as an unofficial divemaster, giving dive briefings and leading groups of divers underwater. TIRING - being one of two people responsible for gathering everyone's dive gear and tanks in wheelbarrows, wheeling them across the sand, down to the long rickity dock, loading it onto the boat, and assembling all of the gear while still trying to be the first ones on the boat, ready to go. EXCITING/AMUSING/FRUSTERATING - learning to live in Mexico. walking down a dusty dirt road barefoot with an empty 20L water bottle, paying 20pesos, and returning with a full one. learning the timing of the fruit and veggie trucks (only source of fresh produce) and then remembering the names of veggies and fruits. doing laundry in a manual machine which turns white gray. cooking three meals a day with one pot and one skillet. Learning to adapt quickly when refrigerators randomly stop/start working, and/or the electricity goes to half, especially when you've just arrived home with two bags of fruit and veg. HARD - learning to live VERY closely with my french roomate. trying to understand her moods, trying to not drive each other crazy, learning to still have fun with each other. BORING - sitting in the empty shop, reading for hours on end while nothing happens and yet you can't leave the shop. BEAUTIFUL - the beach, the shop, the house, the reef, the foliage, the people, the town. DELICIOUS - the leaky palapa. how i miss linda and marla and their culinary masterpieces. well, marla's culinary masterpieces. Linda's alcoholic masterpieces. now that they're back from their honeymoon, i wish i could pop back down for another 4 course meal (pre-dinner drinks count as a course).

Then there were my random mexican travels and experiences. we went everywhere.
Playa del Carmen - visiting friends, having fun nights out, meeting locals, shopping.
Tulum - beautiful beach, wonderful friendly people and hostel, fun shops, excellent tamales,
Cenote Diving in Dos Ojos - most fantastically unexpected, unreal experience. swimming through crystal clear water punctuated by stalagtites and neon blue jets of light, feeling as if you're flying. Just incredible.
Centoe Swimming - always refreshing and exciting. from open pit cenotes, entrances through 30m spiral staircases, entrance by jumping through a small hole in the ceiling about 20 feet into the water, and huge, expansive cenotes filled with hidden entrances to back pools.
Coba Ruins - breathtaking. Getting there early in the morning allowed us to be the only ones we saw for the first hour and a half while we biked through tiny jungle paths over tree roots and rocks under dense vegetation that would suddenly open onto ancient ruins as if we were discovering them for the first time. also one of the few where you can climb to the top of the grand pyramid - a good 2.5x taller than the forest around us. (slightly terrifying trip down)
Bacalar - the lagoon of 7 colors. a beautiful freshwater lagoon and a very cute little town.
Chetumal - the capital of Quintana Roo, a sprawling, bustling city on the chetumal bay.
Cozumel - A fun, thoroughly carribean island, largely undeveloped, with spectacular drift diving with massive parrotfish.
San Pedro, Belieze - A brisk, windy, 45 minute boat ride away from Xcalak. Bustling with golfcarts and tourists, it was a welcome voyage into civilization, with pretty pricy but very plentiful stores.

Though at the end i was ready to move on, ready to come home and begin the next adventure, i LOVED my mexican life. and i don't think i realized how much i loved it until i came home.

It made me more aware, allowed me to be separated from my American context and develop a new mindset of minimalism, simplicity, and realness. i became a vegetarian in mexico. i became aware of my responsibility to the earth as a consumer. I think i became a better person. it's important to remind myself sometimes of these things, because it  is shockingly easy to slip back into Americanism. that's the thing that surprised me the most about moving back home - how quickly and seamlessly i slipped right back into what i was doing/thinking/planning as if mexico hadn't happened at all.
i realized how much where you live, the culture you are part of, really does affect who you are and how you live.

week one recap

Hola a todos! 

Wow I can’t believe it has been over a week since we’ve been here!

I’ve got a little bit of time, so lets do a recap of the week, kay? 

Friday - you heard about Friday. We arrived and did a lot of divemastery things, got to dive with my family for two dives which was great! (and did my 90th dive!) Then for dinner we went to taco night at toby’s. Basically they let you choose chicken, fish, pork, steak, or shrimp tacos on flour or corn tortillas and then you get to go up to the front and dress them with all sorts of salsas and veggies. Yum. 

Saturday - I was a real DM(t) (sorry, that’s Divemaster (trainee))! I went with camilo (an instructor) with a group of german and spanish divers, doing all of their equipment stuffs and supervising the divers. I was buddied up with the only unmarried member of the group, and had to basically underwater babysit him as he constantly wandered off and floated up and ran low on air. But I got to be all divemastery and cool and...i made tips! With them chloe and I went out for pizza. Yum. 

It was really interesting being on the dive boat. All of the germans preferred spanish to english, except for the one I was buddied with who knew no spanish, but some english. The other two were spanish but spoke perfect english, even to each other. Our two colombian staff people (camilo and margarita) obviously speak spanish and I speak very little spanish. Haha but there was no real rhyme or reason to when which language would be spoken! Everyone mixed up spanish and english just willy nilly, even between sentences or with sentences mainly in spanish with english words thrown in or vice versa. Luckly, everyone was speaking slowly since it was a second language to most of us so I could understand most of what was going on and comment or respond to questions. At one point I was talking to one of the men and realized that he was speaking english and I was answering in spanish! Haha it was an odd, confusing multi-lingual time, but it was fun.  

Sunday (easter!) - I got to help out with a discover scuba diving course which was fun. I felt all cool and DMy. Then chloe and I had an excellent easter dinner of avocado, tomato, and cheese sandwiches with mango and milky way for desert which we ate in bed watching apocolypta. Haha we were just so tired and worn out that we had to just veg. Oh, this was also the day that my arms and back were so tired that I turned over a wheelbarrow full of gear on the dock and had to jump over and pick it all back up! Haha 

Monday - Our arms got a nice rest and our brains went to work - our first classroom day of our DM training. Nothing too heavy duty yet (physics and physiology come later!) just the basics, but it was fun learning all about how to be good divemasters. We watched one of PADI’s world class quality videos and learned that not only should divemasters be excellent divers and good role models, but they should always wear perfectly matching flourescent gear underwater and on land should also try to wear the brightest colors possible and have the biggest hair possible (although if you can’t have big hair, having a really high forehead is also acceptable). Monday night we moved into our new home! And went grocery shopping! 

The grocery store closest to us that we go to the most (we call it the orange store, because of the color) is kind of an old fashioned store - the kind where you stand behind a counter and tell the dependiente what you would like. Haha needless to say this gets a little difficult and funny. It usually ends with us being told to come back behind the counter and get what we would like ourselves. Lol. For some reason yogurt is a very hard word in spanish. Mainly because it is so much like “yogurt” and yet completely different so if you say “yogurt” they don’t know what you’re talking about…

Tuesday - a french guy (who’s basically mexican because he’s lived most of his life in mahahual and chetumal) came to do his advanced open water and rescue diver courses with us, but our spanish speaking instructors were gone so we took him on two fun dives. For the first one we were joined by edwardo, a local. I got to be a good DM and correct his bouyancy and point out interesting things to him. It was fun. We saw a spotted eagle ray!!! Wahoo! It was at a distance, but still. For the second dive edwardo left and John (who we stayed with the first three nights) came so I basically just got a fun dive! We did alejandro’s reef which has fun swim-throughs and there were two big green morays and a teeny arrow crab! 

Wednesday - This was supposed to be my office day since Jeanne and Jim were going to cancun to drop of their daughter. It ended up just being my office morning and my biggest dive day yet! In the morning I kitted up the boat and got the divers thier wrist bands and got them on thier way and took care of some snorklers, and that was about all the office work there was. So I read my DM manual and did some emailing and then around 11 camilo asked me to come on Jeremie (the french guy)’s advanced open water (AOW) dives. Yay! So we went on a peak performance buoyancy dive and a navigation dive and then….a NIGHT DIVE! Wahoo (although it was a bit ickly towards the end because as the dive progressed more and more worms came out and were attracted to our lights. They swarmed us at our safety stop! Eww! But we got to play with some fun bioluminescence and saw some nice lobsters and a DECORATOR CRAB! Hehe so cute. They select and shape sponge caps that they hold in place with two tiny hat-holding legs! No joke! Haha this one had a very fashionable orange cap. 

Wednesday night was also chicken night! 

We got back a bit late from our night dive, so we were the last three there (jeremie came along) but it was nice. Very good chicken and sides at a classic outdoor mexican “restaurant” which is only open on wednesdays and only ever serves chicken. Haha I guess if you do something well, why do anything else? 

Thursday - Very rough seas. This was predicted by our captain who said that if there are a lot of worms at night, it means rough seas the next day. They’re really creepily accurate with thier weather predictions. Maybe our meteorologists should spend less time looking at computers and more time looking at worms and pelicans…

Anyways, because of the rough water we didn’t have any clients except jeremie who we took for a deep dive. If was fun and reminded me a lot of a site in mahahual. After the dive we surfaced and...no boat! Haha so we whistled and waved etc until finally we saw the boat, and he saw us. Unfortunately the boat had engine problems and couldn’t come to pick us up! Haha so we floated on our bc’s and chatted for a bit (maybe 15 minutes?) until another boat could come rescue us. It was pretty funny. Then we went to  lunch at toby’s with jeremie and came back and did a drift dive at la poza which suddenly had the biggest current ever just for the occasion! Haha but we saw a nurse shark’s tail and tons of huge jacks and tarpon. Awesome. 

Friday - I stayed in the shop most of the day doing EFR training with jeremie and working on my DM manual. Then we went out and did his confined water skills in which I got to demonstrate how to rescue a tired diver at the surface and then got to be a panicking victim a few times. Fun!

Friday night John and Mary took us out to the Leaky Palapa - the gourmet restaurant in town which is said to be the best restaurant in the southern yucatan! It was a wonderful time. We started with pre-dinner drinks (mojito for me) around 6:15 and then went to our table around 6:45, opened a bottle of chilean wine, and had an amazing three course dinner. The whole affair lasted about 3 hours! Haha. But it was incredibly delicious. Chloe and I couldn’t decide between the mixed green salad and the carrot ginger soup for starters, so we each got one and shared. The soup was incredible. Ah, so nice. And it was so nice to eat a salad with fresh veggies and green mango. Yum. For the main course I had snapper with a tequila-lime sauce (amazing) and for desert an amazing mango lime sorbet. I went for the lightest desert of the menu because I was so full, but I tasted chloe’s chocolate torte and john’s carribean bread pudding and both were absolutely to die for. Mmm….

It was a good night. :)

Saturday - I got to go an a pretty amazing dive trip to two of our southern sites: La chiminea and Scott’s playground. La chiminea has an amazing cavern in the reef wall with a cool coral formation in the middle and a huge skylight (chimney) for which it is named. Scott’s playground is a reallly really cool place. So cool. Wow. It has an amazing reef wall and some really nice canyons between the fingers of corals, but the coolest thing is all of the tunnels underneath the corals! We did three short normal swim-throughs and then three long cool tunnels which were sometimes completely closed off overhead and sometimes had nice skylights, but were really really interesting. For the divemaster course we have to map a dive site and we have been assigned this site. Luckly they were all good divers and had cameras so they wanted to go nice and slowly, so I got to just follow behind slowly and draw a rough little map for myself so that when we actually do the mapping dive I will have some Idea of what the site looks like. It was a lot of fun! And for our surface interval we took a river trip through the mexico-belieze border and into chetumal bay. It was a really nice boat ride through the mangroves. Really interesting. And we saw a pelican stretching its wings into the wind, which told our captain that the wind was going to pick up. Sure enough, it was a nice windy night for sleeping. 

Sunday - I stayed at the shop in the morning and did some learning (trudging through the chapter on diving physics.) and then helped with the first confined water session and dive of an open water course which was fun. Also, a friend (helen) from Punta Gruesa randomly showed up with Luise (a friend we met at carnival) to say hi! They wanted to go diving, but they were a bit late. Hopefully they’ll be back and I can show them around underwater xcalak! :)

And that brings us up to date! 

Life is good here. I am sunny, salty and barefoot - just the way it should be. 

DMT in Xcalak. yes, this is the life.

so this morning i began my divemaster internship in Xcalak, Mexico (that teensy town almost to belieze).
we began by filling wheelbarrows with everyone's gear and tanks and pushing them down a long rickity dock that bounces and shakes as you walk. i almost pushed it right off the edge, but not quite! haha it was a close one.
next, we put everyone's dive kit together on the boat and stowed all of their gear.
next, we dove!! the diving is incredible! it is much better than cozumel, which is pretty much what everyone considers the crown jewel of diving. amazing. really.
next, we changed everyone's kit over to new tanks and hauled empty tanks back to the compressor bodega.
next, we dove again!!! even more incredible dive with huge schools of massive tarpon and horse-eye jacks and a huge (meter long?) balloon fish! wow! the dive ended at a beautiful coral outcropping called the world cup, because it's pretty much the same shape.
next, we took apart everyone's kit, hauled it all back, rinsed it and hung it up to dry, then hauled all of the empty tanks back (really almost drove off the side of the dock. it was a pretty close call!)

and that was basically our day, next was lunch (around 2:30) and getting some kit for some snorkelers, and then some odd shop stuff before we did some grocery shopping (and had a town tour).

oh, it was also taco night tonight at toby's. very tasty.
well, it's time for bed now, i've got another big day of divemaster training to do tomorrow! (i'm coming home with some major muscles, just to warn you)
until then!
tori

The first phase of mexico comes to an end

Well, i spent 10 fond weeks on the shores of Punta Gruesa near Mahahual, Mexico with this odd looking group of divers. It was a wonderful experience and we all got so close to each other that it was very sad to pack up and say goodbye on Friday. The good news is that almost everyone will be staying in the costa maya area at least for another month or so, so there will be opportunities to see each other again.

But after our final dives on wednesday we had a nice farewell party before getting up and doing a mega clean on base, packing everything, and having an end of the phase presentation. We all received certificates and photo C.D.'s and traded contact info and the next morning we all left - some went early to chetumal, some stayed in mahahual, but most of us went up to Playa Del Carmen. This let us have one last party night together before Megan and i boarded a bus to the airport and flew to our respective countries.

I will certainly miss Punta Gruesa and i am thrilled that i am not done with mexico yet, that i get to come back down for 3 more months. My new town is so cute and little, my dive shop is friendly and clean, my apartment is amazing (and comes with a pet raccoon) and my roommate is amazing. The next three months will be perfectly marvelous.

my soon to be home

alright, grab your maps of mexico, zoom in on the yucatan, find the southern sticky-out part, and follow it all the way down to just before the belieze border and thats were i will be living. it is named Xcalak (is-ka-lak) and it is a teey tiny fishing village with very little tourism.
i will be working with XTC (extasy) dive center which is a cute little padi dive center with a little hotel next door and i will be living in town somewhere.

we went to visit it today and it is adorable. i dont know where people buy food - there is nothing there! but i will figure it out and it will be wonderful. and its only about 45 min from mahahual, so i can always run into town to pick stuff up or see people.

all in all it will be great. i will be living with someone i don't know, but we'll soon be best friends for sure.

and.....the diving is supposed to be absolutely fantastically amazing. so i'm pretty excited.
pics soon?

Today i was a dolphin.

Today was incredible. and when i say incredible i mean absolutely mindblowingly awesomely amazing.

i set sail on our little hu'ul kiin early in the morning to do some coral monitoring, did a successful transect (during which a spotted moray bit my monitoring pole). i thought i was going crazy because i kept hearing dolpin noises all around me, but i looked up and there weren't any dolphins. I figured it was wishful thinking because yesterday i got to snorkel with about 25 dolphins. it was pretty awesome.
but when we surfaced, captain Gen told us that we weren't hearing things, that they had been playing with dolpins on the surface the entire dive and they were still there! so we hopped on, drove a little south and flung ourselves off into the most incredible experience of my entire life.

i hopped in and immediatley saw three dolphins, so i swam over and they were just playing with us! Tristan dove down and i watched him spiral up with dolphins swirling all around him. they swam between us and with us and it was sooo cool. at one point i was swiming and there were about 5 dolphins within 3 feet of me, swimming with me and brushing against me! i felt like i had been accepted into thier pod! they were so curious and interested in us, they kept swimming up and looking at us and swimming alongside us. we petted them and they not only let us but were basically asking us to continue! i had a full 2 minutes of fun with one dolphin who decided i was a good friend. he kept swimming around me in circles, staying about a foot away and i would place a hand on him and when i took it away he would whistle and bob and so i pet him again and swam alongside him and it was just incredible. we dove down and swam like dolphins and watched as they jumped several feet into the air!!
we spent 45 minutes playing with them. and for most of the time i was within 4 feet of a dolphin, if not much closer. there were probably 15 in all, both bottlenose and atlantic spotted.

the most awesome thing ever.

then i spent this afternoon paper macheing turtle fins for the carnival in Mahahual this weekend. so we will be in town friday and saturday evenings doing a parade and participating in the festival. should be a blast. i will definitely ppost pictures.

until then, adios.
i have a pretty spectacular life. i won't be returning to michigan any time soon.

what a day!

so, today was pretty much the best day in a long time.

to start, we had a great night of love song sing a longs and all the girls found cute hand made valentines left on our pillows which was super adorable. we suspect jamie and andy as they are rumored to have spent quite a while in the office yesterday afternoon... haha

today was beautiful and calm - not a wave crest in sight. i went out on the first wave (i love first wave, it's so early and pretty and quiet) and it was just beautiful. there were flying fish everywhere on the way out and the reef was so alive and interesting. i saw my first mantis shrimp and measured a pretty awesome patch of dendrogyra cylindrus (pillar coral). it was a brilliant day and i was so content getting back on the boat that i almost couldn't believe it when our capitan told us that there were DOLPHINS so i quickly got my mask fins and snorkel back on while we were driving and sure enough, there were 5 dolphins playing a little ways away! so i flung myself off of the boat and had the most awesome 15 minutes or so of dolphin fun. we were pretty much chasing them for most of it becuase they were on their way somewhere or other, but they came really close (about 3 feet away at one point) and it was so cool to hear them all underwater, hearing their clicks and whistles getting louder and then seeing one rocket up from the depths....awesome.

we finally figured it was time to go since we were already late for wave two, so i switched over my gear in record time and we jetted out with Raph to LM, one of my favorite sites where we did several awesome swim throughs, saw a huge green moray and a lionfish and a huge black grouper and a ray. it was an excellent dive, capped off by an epic battle at the safty stop involving our measured pvc "cc poles" and purge buttons. haha.

the rest of the day has been unremarkable, but it has just been a gorgeously chill amazingly beautiful day.
ahhh. i love life.

coming up on the half way mark....whoa.

This past week has been fabulously amazing. first, i had my 50th dive, which was very appropriately my best TURTLE dive to date. an awesome hawksbill turtle came and hung out with us for what felt like 5 minutes. it was in sanely awesome. Jamie (welsh guy/hut mate/dive buddy) even gave me the "fucking intense man" sign underwater (it came from Corwin, an awesome canadian who gets ridiculosly excited about diving stuff). very cool.

then TEFL, which was so much fun. i taught three classes and participated in a fourth. i taught 1st and 2nd graders, after school kids who were about 12, and adult intermediates (which ended upjust being one guy, but it was great).. the kids got a bit chaotic, but it was such a rewarding amazing experience. i really enjoyed it.

THEN, thrusday night dave and i took a taxi up to limones and hopped on a 22:30 bus to Tulum and arrived at about 1:10 in the morning.
Tulum is a great city. i really like it there. Friday morning we got up early and beat the tourists to the Coba ruins which are all hidden away in jungle and you get to rent bikes and ride around to all the different sections. we even climbed the great pyramid temple thing. then we took a taxi to a cenote a few minutes away which was so cool. we got in through a little spiral staircase into this awesome cave with deep, clear blue fresh water. it was soo much fun. although after being so used to salt water we were all feeling oddly sinky and we had to hold on to flotation devicesso we wouldn't drown! haha.
Saturday  mortning we got up early again and went on a CENOTE DIVE which is the cooolest thing ever. we went to Dos Ojos which means two eyes because it is two big cenotes connected by caves. the water is so clear and amazing it looks like your swimming thorugh air! incredible. and on the second dive we surfaced breiefly in a bat cave!! haha
that afternoon we went to Akumal beach where we went snorkling and saw 12 different green sea turtles in the span of about 30 minutes, not to mention the rays and fish and corals. sooo amazing.

Saturday night we went out on the town and stayed out quite late, so we had a nice chill sunday. tasha dave, amy and i went to the beach at Sian Ka'an reserve which was beautiful, but much farther away than we anticipated, so we hitched a couple rides there and back.

unfortulately it has been windy on base so we haven't been diving the past two days, but we did a bunch of rescue skills today and we're definitely keeping busy. we also learned monitoring methods today and will be doing our practice monitoring soon. that should be fun.

hope everyone there is keeping warm! i'll be thinking about you while i'm laying next to a palm tree in the sand studying coral species!
love and kisses,
tori

It's flying by!

I can't believe how quickly the time is going here, already it's week 4!
It has been a good week, although it's been extra windy so we have had three non-diving days which is sad. we've been studying a lot and snorkling a lot, but its just not the same. we're now learning coral diseases and predation and commpetition, rescue diving manual, and BTEC course work. it's a lot of studying, but i have to say i have found a new favorite study spot - swaying in a hammock on a beach. yes. lovely

we also had an EFR (emergency first responder) practice senario after beach clean yesterday. haha we walked back with our bags full of rubbish and heard mad screaming so we ran over and there was ketchup everywhere with a fake car crash and a person who had fallen down stairs. i am proud to say that i followed perfect EFR protocol and effectively saved Arturo. yay. however, not everyone was aware that it was a practice senario. one of the groundskeeper ladies and a visiting person from the GVI boston office saw it and started screaming until someone explained that it was only ketchup. lol it was funny.

This week cynthia and Olly from the mexico office came to visit and my wonderful family sent me a package of goodies with PECANS!! oh, so exciting. the people at my table during dinner said taht it was the most exciting thing that had happened all week and we had fun passing around sweethearts. then i had the best (used loosely here) porridge ever with pecans and honey and peanut butter. mmm.... it will definitely help the morning ritual.

what else....the weather is gorgeous and live is wonderful. today i had incredible homeade strawberry and bananna helado (ice cream for you gringos). great.

i will put some more pictures up soon.
right now i need to pass the computadora on to un otra persona, por eso hasta luego mis amigos.

Tori

Picture time! (now sing da da da da, da da, da da, can't touch this!)

This is my hut - Tiburon (also known as the penthouse)

I live here with 7 other people - a south aftrican girl, an australian girl, an american girl, a brittish girl, a brittish guy, and a welsh guy. it's a good group.

This is my bed! cozy huh? i love living under a mosquito net. and, notice my lovely blue mexican blanket and there is another grey one folded at the bottom in case of a sudden cold spell.

i love living here! what you can't see is that the floor is the beach. haha and yet we have a door mat. just so that the beach sand doesn't mingle with our special hut sand. haha. and you can see the lovely two inch wide gaps in all of the boards on the walls as well as the like foot wide gap between the roof and the walls, but with a mosquito net it doens't really matter and it lets in really nice breezes, so all is good. it also lets in nice creatures. i have made a pact with the geckos already and we have a crab living under tasha's bed, and i found a teeny little crab when i was getting dressed the other day...
it's a good time. i like it lots.

This is one of our cute little dive boats! one is named hul-kiin (ray of sun?) and the other is named kaliim-ha (coral sea) both in mayan. they're so adorable and small, we have to walk them out deep enough before we can get in, and there is only room for six divers and one captain. getting back in after diving we have to pass everything up to the captain while holding onto the side so we don't get crushed or swept away and then all get in on (or try to get in) on the count of three. haha. i'm not very graceful about it i have to admit.


That has to be all for today, sadly. except to tell you that i sawe my second turtle today!! wahoo! it was incredible. He swam over and was only like i don't know, 5-10 meters away from us and was just looking at us and checking us out for awhile before swiming away. we all just froze and forgot all about coral spotting for several minutes watching. it was just incredible. i love love love turtles. they keep their back legs tucked under and are so amazingly graceful with thier huge shells and just two front fins. also, they're like always surrounded by other fish which i think is funny.

i love it here. i love diving. i love the sand and the beach and the different accents. love it.

More soon,
love to all!
Tori

Semana Dos

I am officially an advanced open water diver! and i have passed my coral exam!! woot!
there are only three of us that have passed the coral exam so far, but i'm sure more will be joining our club tomorrow. Next step is spot dives, basically in-water coral tests. i've done two so far and they've gone well...i have yet to get a 100% though. tomorrow? perhaps. i get to dive twice tomorrow!! woohooo

oooooohhh!! speaking of diving, i'm so excited because yesterday i saw my first seahorse and my first lionfish underwater and today i saw my first RICORDEA FLORIDA!! yippee. awesome.
also, i swam in a rashie and shorts today, and the water was perfect. it'll be nice to not have to pull on a wet wetsuit every day.

on another happy note, my laundry dried! haha i did tons of laundry yesterday and as soon as i hung it up to dry it started raining and didn't stop until dark. luckly, today was sunny and it dried nicely, so i have clothes once again (not quite clean, but who really cares?)

tomorrow we also start our practicals for our emergency first responder training (fancy first aid). we've already watched parts one and two (primary and secondary care) of the video (top notch film by the way, you should all rent it and marvel at the realism and superb acting skills.) It should be fun, bandaging each other up and getting out the recusitation dolls. i enjoy those things.

what else....
friday night fiesta was a blast. great meats and cheeses, and of course salsa!! haha we have three mexican staff members and two mexican expedition members, plus an odd fisherman or two so we had a great time.
Saturday we went into actual mahahual, instead of casitas (a kind of sub-town??) and it was really nice. the damage from hurricane dean was really obvious because most of the land next to the pretty little sidewalk is empty, but it is still nice. Tasha and I had great authentic tacos and pina coladas on the beach. wonderful end of a weekend.

it's weird starting the week on sunday, and i keep messing up in my head what day it is...lol

but life is great. my feet are bare, my hair is salty, the water is warm and the tropical breezes are blowing. who could ask for more?
i made a pact with the geckos this afternoon. i explained to one who was on our wall about symbiotic relationships and asked if he and his friends would like to have a mutualistic relationshp with us, and he chirped at me, so i think that was affirmative.

i'm also learning lots of nice brittish words. jumper, fringe, sunnies, rashies, mozzies, loo, knackered, chips, crisps, tuck, vest, peg, and they have funny names for zucchini and french presses...but i can't remember them. we've been teaching them american as well. things like suds, bangs, scootch, hoodie, zucchini, milky way...
it's fun.

it's now 8:30 and i'm pretty "knackered", so i think i'll go brush my teeth, take off my "jumper", maybe put on a "vest" and get under my mozzie net to to go bed. :)

entonces, abrezos y besos (hugs and kisses),
Tori.

One week has blown by already!

i can't belive that i have been living in mexico for over a week now.
last thursday i arrived in sunny Cancun and took a taxi down to Playa del Carmen - a fun town that i look forward to exploring more. i walked along the beach and "fifth avenue", got some marriage proposals and a free henna tatoo before grabbing a tamale and heading back to my hotel (where a little towel elephant was waiting for me!). The next morning i woke up early, checked out, and then walked around the corner to meet everyone at the adorable Hotel Colorado. then we grabbed some banannas for breakfast and walked down to the bus station where we hopped on a first class bus to Mahahual. 4.5 hours later we arrived and got in taxis for the last 45 minutes of the journey to lovely Punta Gruesa base.
it's so lovely living in a sand bottomed hut next to the ocean and i really enjoy sleeping under a mosquito net.

Everyone is from all over the place. the brits definitely outnumber us, and the mexicans come in second! some are from australia, wales, south africa, england, and scotland. they're all really friendly and nice, and we all get along well, something that is sooo important in a situation like this.

Food is generally okay. porridge for breakfast is getting old, and i've never eaten this much pasta before in my life. haha but it's good. we take turns cooking every four days and everyone has done well so far.

i love living here and i'm soooo excited about things to come.
more later,
tori

Hola a todos!

Hey everyone! i'm at the end of my internet time for the day, so i just want to say that everything is going superbly well here at Punta Gruesa. It has been freakishly cold all week, but today the sun finally peeked out and the weather is turning, so all is well.
the diving is fabulous.
the people are wonderful.

and, i'm on blog duty for the expedition, so if you check out the GVI mexico blogspot you'll get to see my blogging skills.

well, i have to go, but i'll be on again saturday from Mahahual's internet cafe!
adios!

the final day.

this is my last day in America for 3 months. and i'm still in my pajamas. :P

but i'm all packed and ready to go finally! i have two fifty pound bags and i don't think i could squeeze anything else in. seriously, a fly would have a tough time finding enough room to wiggle in. I'm feeling over packed because of this, but at the same time i'm afraid of not having everything! it's a weird experience packing up to go LIVE overseas in a place you've never been.

I have to admit i'm nervy about getting there and speaking spanish and meeting everyone. i know it's going to be an incredibly amazing experience, but the not knowing is sending my stomach into anxious twitters. as Chelsea would say, the dragons are moving in! :)

It's going to be a crazy day tomorrow. my flight leaves at 6:30, which means getting there by 5 or 5:30, which getting up around 4. yikes. but i'll sleep all the way to Houston and arrive in Cancun before noon, so it's worth it. by 1:00 i should be walking the streets of Playa del Carmen!

so until then, ¡Feliz andanzas!

now...i want to figure out this photo posting thing. bear with me.

Feliz ano nuevo a todo!

well with two weeks to go until my departure, we jetted off to Key West for a lovely bit of end of the year warmth.

some pictures perhaps?
well, in order to see those your going to have to go to facebook. i will figure out later how to do this photo upload thing on blogger.

a wonderful trip. and now....REPACKING!! 3 days to go. whoo.

hope everyone is having a lovely break and had an excellent christmas and new years!

Much love! :)