One Month In

I have officially been here in Seychelles for one month now. Hard to believe! We have made it through our first four week period – 19 people (the “four weekers”) are leaving this weekend and 10 “newbies”  are arriving on Saturday. Only 7 of us are staying , so we will have a smaller group of for this next 4 week period, which means more dives for us!

Here are a few things I’ve learned over the past 4 weeks:

• ·         How to be a better diver, I’m up to 24 dives now and just over 16 hours underwater, though I am still learning and improving on every dive
• ·         How NOT to navigate underwater (blog post to follow)
• ·         How to husk a coconut with a pick ax and how to crack open a coconut with a machete
• ·         How to pick a young coconut from the tree and cut a nice hole in it for fresh coconut water straight from the source (so much better than that canned crap in the States!)
• ·         What it feels like to step on a very large snail with bare feet (not good)
• ·         How to make different kinds of bread from scratch – flatbread, pizza dough, rolls, focaccia bread, etc. No, I have never attempted this before. Why would I? I live in America, we are too lazy to do anything ourselves when we can just buy it at the supermarket.
• ·         How to estimate distances and depths in meters , not feet and yards and how to estimate temperature in Celsius, not Fahrenheit
• ·         How to tell time the British way: 1:30 is “half past one,” not “one thirty”
• ·         30+ people can survive on a diet based on rice, potatoes, pasta, bread and porridge
• ·         How to say “let’s go!” in Arabic – “Yala! Yala!”
• ·         How to run the air compressor to fill the air tanks for all the dives
• ·         How to correctly identify 50 different coral types found here in Seychelles
• ·         Walking distances are all relative to the number of hills – the bus stop may only be a mile up the road but there are 4 major hills to climb to get there = 30-40 minute walk.
• ·         Bus drivers here are some of the bravest (or craziest) people I know, as there are some insane hairpin turns and very narrow two way roads that they speed down, honking their horn to warn oncoming traffic
• ·         Brits and Americans, while sharing a common language, do use different words for things. For instance, a “rubber” in Britain is an eraser, and someone will often turn to me on the boat and ask for a rubber for their slate, which always makes me smirk just a little bit.
• ·         Fruit bats are possibly the loudest and most annoying animals I know, though I can now sleep through most of their squawking at night
• ·         Life without a cell phone is so freeing and awesome, sorry to anyone who has tried to get hold of me in the past month and failed. I’ll call you back in December. Turn your phone off for a bit, or better yet, leave it at home and actually pay attention to your surroundings and the people you are with. It’s way better.
• ·         Life without daily access to the internet is possible and actually really nice – I have no idea what is going on the world, but I have never been more present to anything that I’ve been doing in my life as I am here. Again, sorry to those of you emailing me and waiting patiently for days (or weeks) for a response – I’ll get back to you eventually; it’ll just be in Seychelles time…