Day 196! 4 more days till day 200! Today ended up being a lackluster day… but it was partly because I messed up. It wasn’t entirely my fault, but I’ll explain…

Well… today was my first oopsies with the diving schedule.

I was sound asleep, with my alarm set for 8am. I was told in the morning I needed to be in class at 9am, so I assumed that was still the case. But at 7am I got woke up by a phone call from my friend Kit asking me if I was coming diving.

I was pretty frustrated he woke me up but I quickly took a look at the schedule… lo and behold I was on it! Now, I should’ve checked the schedule before going to bed (it’s finalized at 8:30pm)… but in my tiredness I neglected this and trusted what I was initially told.

Thankfully no one was upset or mad and everyone understood it as a simple drop in communication. But from now on, I’m always checking the schedule.

I was in no alert state to dive or get remotely close to being ready, so I skipped the dives this morning. Unfortunately for me, that meant no diving today.

But I tried to sleep for another hour before getting up and starting my day.

I went over to Taco Shack for a muesli bowl for breakfast. It was another cloudy and rainy day on the island, so it was going to be another lazy morning for me.

I spent my morning playing some pool and then heading back to my room to do some duo lingo and read the rest of Science of Diving.

I also made a quick rainy errand to the boarder run office. I have a border run quickly coming up and I wanted to see if I was going to be able to do it by land or if I’d have to fly. Thankfully they gave me the good news that I will be able to do one more border run so I’ll come back in a week or so to get that all sorted!

I then took a little nap and when I got up, I was about to head to lunch when I got a text from Kit asking me if I wanted to grab some with him when he got back.

I said yes and then after 30-40 minutes we walked in the drizzle down the street to mamas… whichhhh was closed. So we walked back to get our motorbikes and headed down the road a bit to Blue Chair.

Our friend Pauline came to join us as well and we had a lovely lunch chatting about life, diving, and everything in between. I also had Blue Chair’s phenomenal massaman curry, which was a treat to have (and very filling).

After lunch, we headed over to a hostel near Pauline’s apartment to play some pool.

We chatted some more while playing, it was a nice change of scenery from always hanging out at Taco Shack. But I do enjoy our pool table better than the one at this hostel.

2:50pm quickly rolled around and it was time for Kit and I to head off for the class of the day. Today we were sitting in on a react right course.

The reason the schedule changed, was because a diver signed up last minute for her stress and rescue. So instead of assisting it today with just Sina taking her class, this new student needed to do their react right class before they could start their stress and rescue.

So Kit and I sat through another 2 hours of first aid refresher.

We also got to act a bit and play the victim a number of times. And of course, we participated in working on our first aid skills.

The class was an hour shorter than the one Kit and I initially had done, which was a nice surprise. But when we got done I was very hungry. So I grabbed a chicken quesadilla from Taco Shack and Kit challenged me to a couple games of chess!

We had some fun battles back and forth but we ended up both winning one. We then switched over to playing pool with some other people at the hostel, which was very nice too!

A lot of the Taco diver instructors were at the hostel too for a meeting. A number of them stuck around after to hang out so for the rest of the night I stayed and chatted with them.

I’m glad I have such a good relationship with the instructors here. I’ve heard stories of some dive school instructors who won’t be friends or friendly with the dive masters… doesn’t sound like the environment I’d want to be in.

I was still tired from the festivities of the other night, so I left the group early to call it a night.

I’m looking forward to assisting a stress and rescue tomorrow. I will have to go through some of the “hell” again, but I will also get to help stage scenarios and take part in the madness. We’ll see how it goes and I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow and the day after!

– Elie