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.