Day 33 - A very boring account of my typical day that came out of nowhere. Read at your own risk or if suffering from insomnia.

Yet another day of ghastly wind made me realize how much I actually miss diving... It's been only a few days, but seems like eternity. Maybe it's because there is really not much else to do here. Although that is a lie. I have a nice little daily routine even without diving.

Typical Diving Day:

• 6AM - This is the only time I hear my phone ring those days, as I use it as my alarm-clock (despertador in Spanish - funny word, no?). Side note: I'm very proud of this accomplishment, given how inseparable I normally am to my cell phone. Here, I don't even have a land-base phone. Only Skype. The next hour and a half are devoted to leisurely having breakfast while reading my emails, browsing through FB, checking http://www.shirt.woot.com/ to see if I need to expand my collection of t-shirts, etc.
  
• 7.30AM - The dive boat picks us up at the Villa Aldora. Sometimes, if the sea is too rough for the boat to dock (I don't even know if that's the correct term) at our little villa pier, then Kay or Greg (villa managers) drive us to the Aldora Pier in town, where divers get distributed among the boats. It's always fun to watch the dive masters preparing the boats and the gear at the pier. They are a very happy lot, so even at this early hour of the morning, you get some serious fix of positive energy: there are always laughs, and innuendos, and fake fighting, and general joking around.
  
• 1.30 - 2PM - We come back from the two-tank dive. The boat ride to most of the dive sites is about 40 minutes. Each dive is usually 70-90 minutes. And the surface interval in between the dives is about an hour.
• First thing I run to do the second I'm off the boat is take a hot shower. Well, unfortunately, first, I have to rinse and hang all of my 3 wetsuits. It's always a very challenging part, because I'm normally shivering like crazy on a non-sunny day. But the one beautiful thing about this particular chore is that when I'm jumping the steps in a hurry to get from the boat to the Villa's wetsuit nook, I always see a heart-shaped hole in one of the steps and it always makes me smile (at least, this is what I think my purple shaking lips attempt to produce when I see it:)).
  
• The hot shower is immediately followed by lunch. Diving makes you starve. I usually go out to lunch either to La Choza or to La Candella. Both places have something called comida del dia (lunch of the day), that doesn't exist on their menu. So, if you are not a local and don't ask the direct question, you will never be offered anything like that. However, that's the best! It's a 3-course meal consisting of your choice of a soup, entry, and drink. And the whole thing costs only 60 pesos (which is about $5). My soup of choice is always sopa de pasta, Mexican clear-broth pasta soup - very tasty. It is usually served with lime on a side to be squeezed into the soup, but I dislike the way lime makes the soup take and skip that part. And my drink of choice is always agua de jamaica (hibiscus tea). I consume unbelievable quantities of it every day, and only yesterday I learnt that apparently it's super good for detoxification in general, and kidneys in particular (I guess, my poor kidneys weakened by all the migraine medication I took over the past 2 years finally found their "water of life"). As a matter of fact, it was only yesterday that I learnt that it was hibiscus tea. I suspected this much from try #1 due to the drink's deep red color, but never bothered to confirm my theory.

Typical Non-Diving Day:

• If it's a planned day off diving, I wake up when I wake up (which usually ends up being around 7AM). If it's a bad weather day, still wake up at 6AM, cancel the dive, sulk a little over the terrible weather and go back to bed for another hour or so, falling asleep to the sunrise (actually, a beautiful and very peaceful thing to do).
  
• Hang out on the little beach I have downstairs, just staring at the water. OR for hours on end semi-sit on my couch facing the ocean, doing Spanish, Skyping, blogging, FB'ing, reading, studying for my upcoming Cavern Diving Course. OR walk around town. OR visit my Villa Aldora neighbors.

Typical Afternoon / Evening of Any Day:

• 6.30 - 8.30PM on Tuesday through Friday - my Spanish classes. I usually do my homework after I lunch on a diving day and sometimes all day long if I don't dive (this is when I really have the time to indulge in my conjugation addict behavior).
  
• Hang out with the locals, trying to practice my Spanish. Surprisingly, some are willing and able to test their patience and allow me to take the two hours I need to construct every sentence that involves past tense verb conjugation (I blame my heightened sense of conjugating confusion in real-life situations on my newly found addition, as while I'm trying to select the correct form, I literally have pages and pages of rules roll in front of my mind's eye - it's a pretty annoying process:)). That usually happens at dinners, over coffees, at home. Depending on the mood.
  
• Every Sunday - BBQ at Tio Kevin's. I self-selected to be in charge of the dessert.

Dear God, I cannot believe I have just written all of those boring details! That came out of nowhere. This post was supposed to be a rendition of a pretty interesting story my Spanish teacher shared with me today, but then I decided that if I start with it, everybody will definitely think I'm in love with him, and since I'm not, I wanted to quickly go through my daily routine first. And this is the sad result... Anyway, a story from the teacher to follow one day... No more energy to write at the moment. I have officially bored myself...