I haven't been writing a whole lot, and I don't have a lot of pictures because I've been spending a lot of time in my scuba and spanish classes. The spanish school here is not as good as the one in Boquete but its ok. I am in private classes since I am at an awkward level and would either have to go down a group or go up a group to find people to fit with me. Its fine though, its just intense. But I feel like, if nothing else, my comprehension is really getting better.
I had a 45 minute conversation with my spanish teacher yesterday about life, the universe, and everything. It was pretty amazing. But other than that my spanish is not progressing as I had wished because every freaking person on these islands speaks english. And most of the students at this school are dutch or swiss, so they have to speak english to communicate with one another.
But enough about that. What I've actually been spending my time doing is learning to scuba dive. Fun times. I did this on a whim. I ran into some folks in Boquete last week who raved about this place they took lessons and about how amazing their instructor was. They convinced me I needed to try it. And since the weather has been rainy I figured I really had nothing to lose. Diving is a life skill, right? Like Spanish...
So I started on Sunday morning. And I ended up getting private lessons for this too. Which was great. Except for the fact that when you have private lessons, there isn't a single second you can zone out and wonder about the cracks in the tile on the floor. Nope. Its you and the teacher sitting two feet away from one another for hours on end. Luckily I liked him. But even so, I really wanted to space out for a while.
But really that is not even the cool stuff either. The cool stuff was going in the water. Even though I'm scared of fish, it was pretty awesome. And I even let some of the fish touch me. Eek! Well, I wouldn't say I let them, I would say that I was forced into it by a teacher who seemed convinced that I would like it and since he didn't teach me the hand signal for "what the hell do you think you're doing?!?!", I really wasn't able to stop him from putting my hand right near some of these fishes.
I also saw tons of jelly fish (without tentacles), these very neat starfish that are super skinny and wrap themselves around the coral, more coral than you can shake a stick at, parrot fish, giant angel fish, trumpet fish, drum fish, stingrays, some giant groupers, a ship wreck that had a toilet sitting on the submerged deck. Here are some pictures of some of the things I saw. These are not my photos, i just stole them from the internet.
So I had to do all these drills under the water, most of which were fine, but I had to do a compass and navigation exercise and that was kind of a disaster. I didn't get lost, per se, but it didn't go well. The drill was this, I was to follow a compass bearing one direction, then turn around and come back to my starting position. I was fairly sure he told me to go 120 kicks away from him, turn around and come back. So I did that. But the water was pretty dirty, and I lost count of how many kicks I did coming back (120 is a big number to count to) and totally blew by my starting place...and I had to have blown by it by about 200 yards before i realized what I had done. Luckily I had been followed by the teacher once he realized I didn't see him so he took me back to the start place to try it again. I'm sure at that moment he was wishing he had taught me the hand signal for "what the hell are you doing!?!?" because I know that's what he was thinking.
After some clarification, it was resolved that I was only supposed to go 20 kicks away from him, and 20 kicks back (I'm still adamant that he told me 120 to start with, but he is still adamant he didn't). Turns out its a lot easier to get back to where you started when you only go 15 yards in one direction and then turn around and come back.
I also was getting nibbled on by a baby barracuda that morning. Again, the teacher is sure that wasn't the case, but I'm pretty sure I was. I have all these scabs on my legs from the bug bits I've acquired over the last three weeks; they aren't horrible, but they're probably pretty appetizing to something that smells blood. I was swimming around in some really shallow water and felt like i had a weed wrapped around my leg because something kept brushing up against the same spot on my calf over and over and over again. I tried kicking it off, and I thought it was gone, but then a few seconds later I felt it again. I kicked hard again, it went away and then seconds later it was back. I turned to look and saw this fish (or something similar) nibbling one of my scabs on my leg.
Ugh. I was really not happy about this. I kicked hard and it swam away but the emotional damage was done. I was then told by someone else, in an unrelated conversation that barracudas bite the same place over and over again, which is what happened to me. And when i pointed out later a fish that looked like the one biting me, i was told it was a barracuda. This fish was small though, so it didn't actually get any skin or anything, I think it just liked the smell of my bug bites.More animals i saw today:
Sting Ray
Lobster
Full grown Barracuda. I saw two of these beasts today.
Eel
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