New Apartment

I moved into my new place on Tuesday! It's a nice two bedroom with a nice sized living room and a kitchen. It's actually only a little smaller than my apartment I had back in Toronto which is pretty cool. And it came fully furnished.

My buddy who I was crashing with left on Wednesday much to my sadness. He and I became really good friends while I was here. But there are still lots of cool people around.

I passed the exams I had to write and only have the practical remaining for my Rescue before I begin my Dive Master exams and such. Sunday is Sunday Funday which is two dives on the North side (great diving) followed by a BBQ and some drinks!

I think I'll end up sticking around here until August/September and then continue my adventuring. I've had some cool offers from people to go so many places so I guess I'll see when I get there. So far the coolest sounding ones are PNG and Oz.

Another thing...do any of you actually read this or am I posting in vain?

Ceviche and Ceiba

So I made it to Ceiba early Saturday morning. Scott and I checked into a pretty nice hotel, went for a nap and then headed up to the mall to go shopping. The mission: boardies, sunglasses, a bikini and body wash for me and boardies and a hat for Scott.

Then we decided to go catch a movie, Indiana Jones. It was alright, not as great as I was expecting. Then we headed back to the hotel, took another nap, went out for some dinner where I tried ceviche for the first time. Good news, I wasn't sick. Then I even had some shrimp with dinner. So yay! I can finally eat seafood!!!!

Slept in today, missed the morning ferry and spent the morning wandering around looking for sunglasses (which I finally found a decent pair of) and trying to figure out how to kill time until the 4pm ferry. Hence why I am sitting here updating this.

This week I should be spending a ton of time in the water, working on my rescue course and starting my DMT by the end of the week.

Hyperbaric Chambers!

So if any of you have been following my blog or reading my emails, you would know that I am currently diving. One of the awesome things about the shop I'm diving with is that they have the only hyperbaric chamber on the island. What the chamber does it recompress you if you screwed up bad during diving, wither by going too deep, for too long and coming up too fast. it's most commonly used by saturation divers, ocean videographers, etc.

So today I got to play in one to see what its like to be decompressed and recompressed. It was pretty cool.

In other news... I kind of, sort of met a guy. It's nothing serious that I know of. We've been whatever for about a week now. I know, I'm so descript but hey, I have to give you guys some news and most of you know that it was probably bound to happen, considering I'm sticking around here for awhile.

Anyways, I thought I'd give you all a brief update on life. It's pretty good. We're going to try and get the bar to pick up by bringing in some awesome new things.

Sharks?

So I've been on Utila for almost two weeks now and I am loving it here. Great people, great diving and finally, more great weather. For a week we had rain every single night due to the tropical storm that started on the Pacific side of Nicaragua.

For those of you who do not receive my email updates, it looks as if I am stick around this island for a good while. I completed my Open Water and Advanced in 5 days (4 in the water) and I am currently working on my Nitrox specialty (allows me to dive longer), my Emergency First Response and my Rescue Diver course. As I am a bit sick I am only doing the book work. As of Sunday, I'm pretty much diving every day except for maybe Thursday as we are organizing a pub crawl (10 bars) on Wednesday. I know Wednesday seems like an odd night, but its one of the crazy party nights here aside from Friday and Saturday. Conveniently, the bar I'm working at is closed Wednesdays. Definitely not a coincidence.

Sunday is Sunday Funday where we do two dives on the north side (wicked sites), cruise around looking for whale sharks and then go to the dive shops private beach for beach volleyball, BBQ, beer and rum games! Monday will be training dives for me, probably Nitrox as Tuesday we are doing a dawn dive as a going away party/gift for one of the guys here, Ben. Ben is also the one who has been nice enough to let me stay at his place for free until my apartment underneath him opens up. We should be descending into pitch black to hopefully see some hammerhead sharks during their feeding time. We are going to two of the best sites on the island and we'll be back by 8am!

I should begin my Dive Master Training next week which means I get to dive for free, jump on any boat that's going out and when I'm finished, I'm guaranteed a job as a ton of the staff are leaving and I've done all my training here!