Week 7 - Another week in paradise

Welcome to Week 7

Things that happened this week:

• Shaved my beard.
• Halloween.
• I missed home for the first time. Because of Halloween.
• I farted on our dog, Shrimp's, face and did not win Dick of the Day for it.
• (Through tears of laughter I pleaded my case to the jury, and was let off on the grounds that it was given as a gift, not an act of abuse.)
• Won Quote of the Day with, "I accidentally ripped one in Shrimp's face, as a gift."
• This quote subsequently won Quote of the Week.
• Went to a Filipino internet cafe.
• Did my first scientific survey!
• Got lost on a dive.
• Did some backflips
• Finally watched some World Cup Rugby. South Africa vs. New Zealand was amazing.
• Watched Star Wars. I forgot how TERRIBLE Episode 1 is. Just plain bad.
• Seriously, Episode 1 sucks.
• Got a compliment on my haircut from a Filipino woman. And three men.
• Apparently Coral Cay's head office likes my blog and wants to use it for stuff. Cool. Hi, head office people. I can get more pictures of my thighs if you need.
• Cleaned my bunk. This was a serious undertaking.
• Practiced my cartography skills. Then begrudgingly admitted to myself that math in high school actually had ONE practical use in my adult life.
• Night Dive!
• CNN came and did a story on us and interviewed some of our Filipino scholars. Apparently we'll be international superstars in a few weeks. I don't think my "AMERICA #1 " shoutout from the background will make the final cut. Will keep you updated.

Week 7 Video Recap

Halloween:

Around base we decided to dress up as each others' countries.
German, Scottish, British, American, Filipino, and Australian were the nationalities to choose from.
I traded nationalities with Lea, one of our German girls. She dressed up as a redneck trailer park girl, and I dressed up as a good German boy.
A quick trip to the nearest town's second-hand store netted me a nice shirt, some tight linen shorts, and 4 belts to be fashioned into suspenders.
For the price of $4, it worked out quite well.
You know you have a good costume when the other German girl punches you for looking too much like a Hitler Youth.
(I might have accidentally forgotten to shave a certain portion of my mustache)

Halloween isn't really a big thing here in the Philippines. Apparently they do something similar to Dia de los Muertes the next day, but we were too hungover to get up and go attend. Plus, we were watching Star Wars Episode 1 (to my later disappointment).


Here are some Halloween pics:

The gang
From left to right: William Wallace (Kieran), British bird (Tine), German boy (Hello), King Tut (Achassi), B-baller (Zach),
Trailer Girl (Lea), Trailer Guy (Adam), Aussie girl (Shannon)

German boy

German boy, answering a quiz question

William Wallace

Painting William Wallace

A Scot dressed as an Aussie

White Trash Couple

Shrimp dressed as a skeleton

Here are some other random antics

My laptop crashes when I make videos that get too long or have too much cool stuff in them, so I had to break them up a bit. This one didn't receive the attention the other received. Unequal parenting. 

The Internet Cafe

It's Sunday morning and I'm sitting in an internet cafe in San Francisco (not America), which is the closest town to base. After a short motorcycle ride, I have arrived here to take advantage of the better internet bandwidth and lack of daily data limit so I can download some of the Rugby World Cup games I didn't get to see. Despite my best efforts, I saw who won the final before I could
see the game.. but it will still be plenty fun to watch. Have I mentioned I'm going to be playing rugby in New Zealand this January? And they just won the world cup?
Sweet.

The internet cafe is about the size of my bedroom back home, packed with 16 computers and 10 little Filipino kids gathering around to watch their friends play Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 campaign modes.
Two kids were playing a Warcraft LAN game behind me, but apparently one of them cheated or something, because the victim started yelling and stomped out of the room.

While I can't understand the chattering of the gamers behind me, I do recognize familiar tones and outbursts.
It's very clear when the kid behind me dies in his Grand Theft Auto game, because his friends all giggle and he blurts a sentence that sounds a lot like "Like you could do any better!"
I can tell the onlookers are offering advice on where to go, which weapon to choose, and how to enter the correct cheat codes. Again, while I cannot understand the exact words, I am very confident this is exactly what's going on. This ain't my first rodeo. Grand Theft Auto used to be my jam.

One kid paused his Grand Theft Auto V game to come stand next to me and stare at me for 3 minutes. Even when I made eye contact with the kid, he kept staring.
I think he likes my haircut.

The computer I'm using has two games installed on it:
Counter Strike Xtreme
DOTA
I have not played either game, so this is of no help to my growing need to satisfy my gaming fix.  

Impressions and Observations of the internet cafe:

I haven't seen 14" monitors since....ever.
It was amazing to hold a real mouse and keyboard in my hands again. Trackpads are the worst.
Internet speeds here are...not American, to say the least.
For some reason we all took our shoes off at the door.
Miley Cyrus is playing non-stop in here.
Seeing an Asian playing DOTA in a common space is the closest thing to home I've experienced this whole trip.
There are World of Warcraft stickers all over this room. For a recovering addict, this is not a good thing.
The guy in charge of the cafe is watching a movie where dogs go crazy and start attacking people - complete with lots of barking and over-the-top flesh-tearing sound effects.

After about 2 hours, I had to use the bathroom pretty bad. So I turned around and asked the kid (man?) in charge where I could find the restroom.
He looked puzzled - clearly there was a language barrier. After about a minute of the entire room trying to translate for me, I realized I was getting nowhere fast.
I decided it was time to skip the pleasantries and get down to business.
I deftly pointed to my nether regions and made an exaggerated hissing sound, accompanied by some further hand gestures.
This sent the room into an uproar of 8-year-old children laughing hysterically at a proper potty joke, while the adults tried and failed to repress their smirks.

Crude, yes, but I got my point across and was shown to the nearest bathroom. Plus, I love toilet humor. Poop.

I also think there is a good reminder buried somewhere in this excursion.
There are some parts of our humanity we simply can't avoid.

Boys will be boys, no matter where they are. They'll rib each other, goof on each other, accuse the others of cheating, and refuse to quiet down on a Sunday regardless of how monstrous of a headache the hungover white guy sitting in the corner is battling with.

The same way laughter and disappointment have universal sounds, I knew without hesitation that this room of boys would appreciate a good toilet joke. It's refreshing to see that these kids, brought up in an entirely different country with entirely different customs, are still complete goofballs like I was/am.

Some things are universal to human nature, regardless of nationality, race, gender, religion, and what have you.
I realize this is not a unique epiphany, but having it hit home in a cramped little internet cafe in the
Philippines was...cool.

After the internet cafe, I dropped by the barber's shop and paid him the 2 pesos I owed him from my haircut last week.
He laughed, and while gesturing to the side of his head he asked, "Ahh, American friend, how you like lines?"
I told him I love them. And I do.


Getting Lost

I managed to get separated from my dive buddies on Thursday.

We were tasked with mapping the "South Wall" which is a sharp dropoff point on the southern end of our house reef. Our job was to ride the top of the ridge while taking compass headings every ten meters, so we could then come back and draw a relatively accurate map of the area.
Sounds pretty simple, yeah? Count your fin kicks, stop, write down your heading, rinse and repeat. Pretty easy stuff.

Mapping compass headings

Unfortunately, the ocean had other ideas that day.

Poseidon decided to send us a particularly nasty current during our mapping excursion - such a current that we could no longer ride the edge of the wall, forcing us to descend slightly below the top of the wall to lessen its pull on us. Similar to being near the wall of a building on a windy day, the sea wall gave us some good cover.
Going below the wall to avoid the current worked for a while and we continued to map, but eventually, Poseidon really decided to step on the gas.
The current became progressively stronger, pulling us along the wall very quickly, making our mapping almost impossible. We were going too fast and were going to have to turn back soon.
I then got the brilliant idea to ascend back over the top of the wall to see if the current up there was any better than before. This isn't completely idiotic -  different depths can have their own currents, and there was a chance that going up a few meters might find us an easier current.
I signaled to my group that I would briefly test the current above us and come right back.

I was right, the current was different. It was WAY stronger.

As soon as I crested the wall, WHAM, I was blasted by a current that shot me along in a direction perpendicular to that of my group's. Within 5 seconds, I had gone roughly 30 meters and completely out of sight from my team, with no hope of pushing against the current. So I grabbed a big rock, hung on, and started thinking.

Okay, so I'm alone now.

No worries - I have plenty of air, I'm a trained Rescue Diver, and 2 of my 3 teammates are Rescue trained as well. Worst case scenario I just ascend and have the boat come pick me up. Not the worst.

Part of me was a little excited by the adventure, and the other part was worried about my team's
wrath for making them abort the dive.

The procedure for losing a member of your buddy team is to look for the missing diver for no longer than 1 minute, then if no contact is made you abort the dive and ascend to the surface and reunite there. So according to this procedure I had a minute or so to try and fight my way back to my team before the dive was aborted.
(I really wanted to avoid aborting the dive, because I caulked up our dive earlier in the day)

Fighting the current was no use, so I swam diagonally to get across it and try my luck back below the wall again. As I once again descended below the wall, I started looking for my buddies, figuring they were maybe 20-30 meters ahead of me along the wall. Swimming hard and using dead coral to help pull me along the wall, I got to the point where I expected my group to be. No luck.

Well shit.

I check my dive computer, and sure enough, it's been well over a minute since I lost contact with my dive team - time to go up and face the music.

I ascend to the surface to reunite with my team, foregoing my safety stop as procedure calls for and.....they aren't up.
However, I see their marker buoy on the surface 50 meters away, so I know where they are.
Okay, I'll just wait a minute or so for them to come up.
2 minutes later.. nothing.
I decide to swim over to their buoy and get their attention so they know I'm alright. I arrive at their buoy, look down, and there they are, sitting 10 meters below me.
I start making clapping noises to get their attention, but then the laws of physics decide to bone me. Sound travels 4 times faster underwater, so our ears have a real tough time figuring out which direction a sound comes from.
The boneheads clearly hear my clapping and start looking in every direction to find me, except one - UP.
I can't help but start giggling at their efforts in vain, laughing through my snorkel from on high while they struggle to find where my noise is coming from. (In my opinion, they all looked entirely too calm during this ordeal. For all they knew, I was caught in a crevasse and needed help getting out, while slowly running out of air. The bastards showed absolutely no sign of panic! Call it the result of good training, I call it dickishness.)

I start splashing the water like a madman, hoping maybe one of them will catch the motion in the corner of their eye and look up.
No good.
(For those of you who aren't divers, I can't simply swim down to them because I have already ascended, and I would risk getting decompression sickness by going down again within such a short amount of time. Suffice it to say, that would be really bad. Thanks again, Physics.)
Between laughing spells I try yelling at them to get their attention - duh, idiot, you already tried the sound thing, it doesn't work. Stupid idea.

Here's the really stupid part:
Not once during this whole time do I think to swim over to the surface buoy that is attached to the divers and simply yank on it.
We have entire recall procedures based solely on yanking on the buoy (SMB) to tell the divers to come up to the surface.
It's that simple. Three tugs and a pause, three tugs and a pause, and they ascend. Easy.
Procedure shmocedure, I'd rather use my intellect to pointlessly clap and yell and splash on the surface like an idiot. I'm college edumacated.

After 5 or so minutes they decide to ascend, and as they do, they see my grinning face floating 10 meters above them and promptly give me the bird.

While finally reuniting at the surface some laughs were shared, some words resembling "dumbasses" and "idiot" were tossed around, and we swam back over to the boat.
Good times.




Things I learned this week:

Don't go scouting currents by yourself.
How to properly rinse clothing so they aren't rock hard after washing.
White clothes don't stay white here.
Star Wars Episode 1 sucks.
Star Wars Episode 2 sucks slightly less than Episode 1.
   (Episode 3 is planned for Sunday night, so I will update next week)
Nothing dries in the Philippines. Everything reaches a "moderately damp" point, then stubbornly stays there - clothes, floors, towels, you name it. Eff you, humidity.
Mold loves humidity
My dive buddies don't care when I go missing.
My computer can't handle intense video editing.
Baracudas are not sharks.
Reaffirmed that nothing heals here. (See blisters below)

Blister from playing barefoot basketball 17 days ago.

Blister on the other foot from playing barefoot basketball 17 days ago.

As always, I am alive and well and continuously finding ways to delay maturity - if these blog posts are any kind of record, I am doing quite well at it too. From the time of writing this, I have 31 days left here. Seeing as the last 60 days have flown by, I fully expect the next month to pass by in the next..5 minutes. If you'll excuse me, I'm going to try and take a shower before those 5 minutes are up.

Once again, thanks for reading.

Have a wonderful week.

Hogs Wild