Classes start

So here I am in Singapore, once again enjoying wonderful hospitality..... No wait, it was supposed to start something like this: So here I am suffering and slaving away, a poor student yet again.....
Whatever....
Ok, so I had a full day in Singapore to get to know my host and reaquaint myself with the city before getting down to study and I did manage to find a few more things to blow my mind. Oddly enough, a couple of them were in the Singapore airport! Yes, I made a trip to the airport but for a good reason, I was seeing off a friend of my host Nelson. His friend is off to New York to study so I found myself standing in an airport elevator staring in awe at the little hand sanitizer dispenser right under the buttons.... This was just after I had finished picking up my jaw at the airport parking with all the lights telling you where the free spots are... How could I possibly go home to the less impressive first world of Canada now? Right, so now that I've proven that I am still an itinerant ignorant, let me continue. I guess the swine flu is still news?? I wouldn't know, but from all the face masks being worn by people both here and in Malaysia I suppose there is still something going on.
My class started this morning. It was a little bigger than I expected, a whopping 17 people! Normally it's half that.... It's only offered in a few schools around the world and only a few times a year here so I guess people wanted to get in this one. There are 10 westerners from the US, UK, NZ, Aus and Germany and the rest are either Indian or local. There aren't any prerequisites so it's really a strange mix. Some older guys, some young. One commercial diver, a couple engineers, some from banking and finance, some straight out of highschool....
It runs from 8:30 to 17:00 everyday and we spent the entire day doing physics. Kill us now! How did I end up in a world planning to work in physics. Seriously though, kids, do your math homework, the money is all in math and physics intensive jobs. The good news is that most of it I just recently did in the divemaster program so it's still pretty fresh. The course is actually 1/3 physics, 1/3 physiology/medic stuff, and 1/3 procedures. And we have daily homework! Oh boy.....
I better get back to work....
Ammon

Heading South

So from Koh Tao I ended up in Krabi again for 4 days. In a way nice to do nothing but relax in a place that is also familiar. The banana bread at the bakery is amazing but somehow I am sure that I'm about to lose weight again without being able to go back to my same restaurant meal after meal after meal...
I'll admit I was just too lazy to get anything done or go anywhere from Krabi this time as well and spent all of my time hanging out getting massages and hanging out at the massage parlor with a friend I had made when I was there the first time. My backpack weighs a ton now, must be the heaviest of the whole 4 years. Fortunately I have been wearing a lot of scuba tanks so the weight isn't the problem. The problem is that I feel like I need to jump in the water and become neutrally buoyant.... I also find myself leaving my sandals everywhere as I am not used to wearing anything on my feet anymore either. That might be the hardest part to adjust to, going from barefoot all the time to having to travel in my boots again because I can't fit them in my pack on travel days :(
Somehow I've managed to swing it so that the day I entered Malaysia was also the first day of Ramadan. I wasn't sure if that was really going to make much of a difference but I guessed not with such a large non-Muslim Chinese population. After crossing the border into Malaysia I found myself with the same problem as the first time I had gone that way. 10km to cross before finding a bus station, so once again I stuck out my thumb and hoped for the best. The old man on a motorbike that picked my up seemed to think the best of Malaysia is not very good. He stopped just to help me get a ride and tell me I never would. He had a point, as everyone he asked to take me shook their head and quickly drove off. In the end he got so frustrated that he just took me himself, which meant a ride in the rain on the back of a motorbike with all my gear. Hmmm.... Not the luxury that I'd had the first time, but I won't take his advice to boycott Malaysia in the future. I still like the country.
From the bus station in Changlun I ended up on an overnight bus to Kuala Lumpur only to arrive at 6am and have to wander around in the dark for an hour looking for a hostel. It took that long not because I wanted to wander around and look for that long (despite what my sisters would have you believe) but because almost every place was completely full and the best I could hope for was to get screamed at by the receptionist after I woke him up... When you travel through all seasons you really start to hate the "tourist" season after a while. Eventually I found a hostel in Chinatown with a single room that was a whopping 8ft by 5ft if I round the dimensions up! At least the lighting was good so I could lie in bed a read.
Don't ask me why but I spent about a week in KL. I had 2 friends to visit, Fauziah, who I'd met in Penang on our first visit, and Yi Wei, our host from before as well. He was unable to host me but we did go out for dinner on a couple of nights and I also now have a CS Malaysia shirt :) I don't know how it is possible but I ate a lot of chicken rice in KL at a bunch of different places and I can honestly say that somehow they really don't know how to cook rice. The steamed rice was often hard, or soggy or something wrong. Definitely not Thai rice.....
I was able to explore a little more of the city that I hadn't seen before and apart from the Ramadan market set up in the Kampang Baru section of the city in the early evening, I didn't even notice a change for Ramadan. I developed a little more of an appreciation for the architectural contrasts that KL offer as well. It is kind of bizarre to have old 2-storey colonial or Chinese shophouses complete with faded paint and crumbling exterior and then massive skyscrapers right behind them. Speaking of skyscrapers, I still find it hard to believe that the Petronas towers are some of the tallest in the world. Unless you are standing right under them, they just don't seem that tall. I suppose it's because they are just so perfectly proportioned and you can see them from so far away that you think they are just shorter and closer....
I start class in Singapore on Monday so was hoping to get a place to stay with Paul's extended family (as we did on our first visit) but that fell through at the last minute so spent a few stressful days trying to scramble together anything else. Singapore is expensive... Anyway, last night I got a positive reply from a couchsurfer that I could stay with him and his family. Oh, I so very much love CS!!!! Today I spent in transit getting down here and I am now in Singapore with my new host. All good. Now I just have to turn on my brain and start warming it up for the intense course ahead....
Ammon

Goodbye Koh Tao

Ok, sorry for the delay but it's hard to write something when you don't know what is really going on but now, for better or worse I have made a decision, committed to it and officially begun to panic and second guess.... Well, not really. I am laughing at the way life plays these tricks on me though.
First, a quick recap. I was on Koh Tao for 3 months. I think I did pretty well on the health front since I was one of the few people in that time that didn't have to take any time off diving due to health problems like ear infections, motorbike accidents and other random (usually infected) injuries. It probably was a tapeworm that I had because I took some worm pills and feel much better now.
Back in mid-May I arrived on the island with mom and dad as and Open Water diver with 7 dives and had planned to stay for a couple days to do my Advanced Open Water course before moving on. 3 months later mom and dad are at home and I'm a Divemaster with 145 dives. It probably could've been even more but there was a long stretch of bad weather in there that sucked the motivation out of a lot of us. You might think that over 100 dives on a handful of dive sites would get boring but I've found it to be the opposite actually. This past week or so has been amazing weather and conditions and was my favourite diving of all of it. Even on my last day of diving I was still "discovering" new fish. Sharks, Cobia (they look like sharks and actually scared the fun diver I was with so much that he hid behind me so I'd get eaten first), a close encounter with a turtle (I hope to get that photo up on Facebook soon), my deep dive to 40m and a bunch of other random great stuff. So yes I am sad to be leaving. I think it'll actually be really strange to not be wet all the time and to actually have to wear something on my feet again.
On my penultimate day I was also reminded how dangerous diving can be too. An Advanced student on their first deep dive panicked and bolted to the surface from 27m taking the instuctor and DMT (good friend of mine) with them. The instructor and student were fine later but I never saw the DMT again and rumour had it that he was in decompression....
I extended my departure by one day because on the night I was planning to leave originally there was a staff pool party in celebration of the Business Excellence award the resort got from PADI. What a great way to end my time there, tossing everyone into the pool after an amazing buffet.
Ok, I know you only read all that because you want to know what I am doing now. Currently I am in Krabi again relaxing for a couple of days. I will then make my way back down to Singapore where I have enrolled in a course called "Assistant Life Support Technician" which will start at the end of this month. It's a 2 week course as most of the training is done on the job. After a long period of training you can then write the exams to become a full LST. LSTs are the guys that monitor commercial saturation divers and generally keep them alive and doing their jobs. It involves a lot of physics, physiology and dive theory but I think it will be interesting. At least I can put some of my science background into use again. After that course I will take another in Offshore Safety (not sure how I'll pay for that yet...) and try to land a job on an offshore oilrig or somewhere else crazy and try to rake in the big bucks. I'll need a little luck and the world economy to keep improving but I think I can pull it off. At least it should involve travel and something other than a 9 to 5 job. You know I couldn't handle that now....
Ammon