Bucket list miracles

Everybody has a “bucket” list, whether we call it this way or not. And while some items on this list can be extravagantly unique, there’s a whole bunch that can be considered “bucket list staples”.

The “Dream Extreme” trip we did last week took care of 5 diver’s bucket list staple items at the same time – not bad for one 4-day vacation! And the trip schedule was designed to build up the excitement: every time we got out of the water, the first words I heard were “That was the best dive of my life!” And then the next day, “That was the best dive of my life!” And the next, and the next.

Day 1 – A real drift
Bucket list staple #1, Check!

Diving in Cozumel is always drift diving. It’s natural for me, as I was “born and grew up” as a diver here, but not every destination offers drifts and for many people it’s a thrilling and sometimes challenging novelty. This is something every diver has to experience at least once, whether they get hooked on it and decide to move to Cozumel for more thrill or not.

My personal favorite dive in Cozumel is reef San Juan. Located in the North of the island, outside the marine park, it features fields of beige-coloredstylophora pistillata (club finger coral) and – almost guaranteed – a current so strong that your encounter with any marine life here is only in passing, “Hi, turtle! You are cute. Oh, bye, turtle, gotta go!” It’s a gorgeous dive. Flying over psychedelic corals and sponges is a spectacular sensation: surreal colors, surreal shapes – nice smudges of dimly bright blue, strange yellow, bright green. San Juan reminds me of a Persian carpet and always makes me feel like I’m gliding through a painting, like I am part of this painting – a moving dot ready to jump off the tip of an artist’s brush onto its new perfect spot.

Every time I dive San Juan I rediscover the feeling of pure unconditional happiness. Drift diving just does this to you – you become one with the magnificence of nature. And there are over a hundred different dive sites in Cozumel: each of them unique, each of them gorgeous, and each of them – almost always – an exciting and dreamy drift!

VERDICT: DRIFT DIVING IS A MUST-TRY!

Dive Log – Day 1

August-20-2011: Dive #1 – Palancar Caves: max depth – 76f; bottom time – 44 min; water temp – 84F
August-20-2011: Dive #2 – Cedral Pass: max depth – 55f; bottom time – 58 min; water temp – 84F

Closing sentiment of the day

The first day of our trip was spectacular. Happily tired, we went straight to bed after dinner in anticipation of another long and, hopefully, wonderful dive day.

Day 2 - Cavern mystery
Bucket list staple #2, Check!

The official definition of a cenote is a sinkhole with exposed rocky edges containing groundwater; typically found in the Yucatan Peninsula, cenotes constitute a complex natural underwater cave system. My personal definition of a cenote is a heavenly haven. I have never seen anything more pure, beautiful, and serene. It is both an amazing visual, providing some optical conundrums as you gaze through the absolute transparency of the fresh water onto the jungle outside the cave, and an incredible sensation of all human emotions descending upon you all at once, forcing you to simultaneously feel peace, quiet, danger, age, exhilaration, sadness..

In my opinion, this is the closest feeling to flying. The water is crystal clear and fresh, there are no waves or ripples, there’s no marine life – sometimes you honestly forget that you are diving, especially if you look around and see other divers literally suspended in the air!

Cavern diving assumes you penetrate a cave filled with water – and even though while diving a cavern you are always within the reach of natural light (as opposed to technical cave diving), you are still surrounded by walls and a ceiling, which sometimes close in on you pretty tightly. In other words, whereas for some people cavern diving is a serene meditation, for others it could be an adrenalin-pumping challenge. Both experiences are good in their own right, but I don’t really recommend trying it if you have even a little bit of claustrophobia.

Your buoyancy has to be very good to dive a cenote. The floor of the caves here is comprised of limestone silt (not sand), which means that if by accident you brush over the floor with a tip of your fin, the visibility will immediately drop from 100% to 0%, and sometimes for several minutes – risky and unpleasant. Luckily, everybody in our group had great buoyancy control and we were able to maintain the silt-free environment during our both dives.

Another amazing thing about cenotes here in Yucatan is their location. They are usually tucked away neatly in the middle of the jungle, where the luxuriant vegetation makes you feel like you are being filmed for one of theIndiana Jones movies. Beware of vicious mosquitoes though!

VERDICT: IT'S EASY TO FALL IN LOVE WITH CENOTES!

Dive Log – Day 2

August-21-2011: Dive #1 – Chikin-Ha, right “wing”: max depth - 43f; bottom time - 36 min; water temp - 75F
August-21-2011: Dive #2 – Chikin-Ha, left “wing”: max depth - 40f; bottom time - 43 min; water temp - 75F

Closing sentiment of the day

Another day in paradise! The day was long and full of movement – we had to cross over from Cozumel to Playa-del-Carmen to dive cenotes and then left for Cancun right after the dive, but that didn’t diminish our childlike excitement in the least!

Day 3 – Wreck diving and Underwater art
Bucket list staples #3 and #4, Check-Check!

C58

Wreck diving is yet another special kind of diving where your objective is to explore shipwrecks (or crashed airplanes). Wreck diving is usually deep, as wrecks in shallower waters tend to deteriorate faster. There are thousands of popular wreck diving sites in the world. Some of these are artificial wrecks or wrecks sunk deliberately to attract divers (such as the USS Spiegel Grove in Florida and the Bianca C in Grenada). Others are wrecks of vessels lost in disasters (such as the Zenobia in Cyprus and MS Mikhail Lermontov – a 177-meter cruise liner lost in 1986 – in New Zealand).

Wreck diving options range from no penetration dives over the wreck to explorations of all narrow passages of the vessel, which can go beyond the scope of recreational sport right into the realm of technical diving. Shipwrecks seem to appeal to the human soul on many levels: from inspiring or heart-breaking stories to the mechanics of huge vessels to the ghosts.

On this trip, we went to the C58 shipwreck, located between Cancun and Isla Mujeres. It’s an advanced dive due to its ripping current reputation. And it surely lives up to it: at the safety stop – which we did hanging like grapes on the line because it was impossible to stay together otherwise – I was seriously preparing myself for the possibility of my regulator being kicked out of my mouth by the current! It wasn’t scary a bit though – so much fun! You just have to know what to expect and be ready to act fast, that’s all. Some people in our group had never done wreck diving before – boy, were they excited!

VERDICT: WRECK DIVING IS FUN AND CAN CERTAINLY BE ADDICTIVE!

MUSA

MUSA – Museo Subacuatico de Arte (Underwater Art Museum) – is one of the largest and most ambitious underwater artificial art attractions in the world (I’m sure they’ll soon build something in Dubai to beat that thoughJ). It consists of over 400 permanent life-size sculptures and was created in the waters surrounding Cancun, Isla Mujeres and Punta Nizuc in 2009 by Jason deCaire Taylor.

The museum aims to demonstrate the interaction between art and environmental science and forms a complex reef structure for marine life to colonize and inhabit. Each of the sculptures is made from specialized materials used to promote coral life, with the total installations occupying an area of over 420 sq.m of barren sea bed and weighing over 180 tons!

Today, the underwater museum comprises of 4 installations: Garden of Hope, Archive of Lost Dreams, Man on Fire and Silent Evolution. The Silent Evolution seems to be the most ambitious project – it’s a collection of over 400 life-size sculptures, forming a vast gathering of people aiming to define a new era of living in a symbiotic relationship with nature. Casts for the Silent Evolution were taken from a broad cross-section of society, predominantly Mexican, and from all walks of life: an accountant, yoga instructor, fisherman, student, acrobat, carpenter and park ranger – we are all facing serious questions concerning our environment and our impact on the natural world.

Conceptually, MUSA is a very interesting dive, making you ponder all the questions that inevitably always pop into your head in an above-water museum. In terms of ethics of conscious living, this is a very educational dive. From the diving standpoint though, it’s very easy – shallow (maximum depth – 25 feet) and relaxed (the current is minimal to none, the visibility is great, the water is warm).

VERDICT: MUSA IS AN INTERESTING SAMPLE OF MODERN-DAY ENVIRONMENTAL AWARENESS!

Dive Log – Day 3

August 22-2011: Dive #1 – C58 shipwreck: max depth – 78f; bottom time – 40 min; water temp – 82F
August-22-2011: Dive #2 – MUSA: max depth – 29f; bottom time – 64 min; water temp – 84F

Closing sentiment of the day

Diving extends far beyond fun, raising important questions that humanity is wrestling with – be it natural or man-inflicted disasters. As divers, our job is not only to get technically more advanced, but also advance ethically and apply this advancement into action…

Day 4 – Swim with the biggest fish on the planet
Bucket list staple #5, Check!

The highlight and grand finale of our “Dream Extreme” trip was snorkeling with whale sharks. Oh, I honestly don’t know where to begin!

Maybe the worry… For the past several years, whale shark gather every summer in the waters near Cancun, Isla Mujeres and Isla Holbox to feed onplankton, their favorite delicacy being tuna eggs. It’s a long – about 2 hours – boat trip from any of the three locations. We left at 6.30AM in an attempt to be the first boat on the feeding site so that we can have all the whale sharks we see completely to ourselves (usually this trip starts at 8.30-9.00AM). For miles and miles we were the only boat on the entire visible calm and quiet surface of the ocean. For miles and miles we were happily looking around, excited about an occasional passing dolphin, entertained by the fun stories of the captain. We knew that the trip is supposed to be long, but gradually everybody started to develop this trembling anxiety, “What if we don’t see any whale sharks!” And it’s quite possible – after all, whale sharks are wild animals and nobody can force them to feed on the boat schedule. The worry was heated by the “hit or miss” stories that we heard all over the place in Cancun and by the fact that during the previous two days only 2 whale sharks were encountered (and that is for over 30 boats!). As the leader of the group, I somehow felt personally responsible for success of this mission. To keep the spirits up I kept saying, “Don’t worry, guys, the captain is very experienced. I’m sure he’ll find some whale sharks for us, I wouldn’t worry at all! In fact, I have a feeling that we’ll see at least 60 (no clue where this number came from)!” But secretly, I was getting more and more nervous as time passed and we kept seeing only the calm surface of the ocean. Some grand finale it will be if the most amazing scheduled experience will not happen!

But then… Happy screaming on our boat took me out of my worry-thoughts loop announcing that we have arrived!!! And – my intuition truly impresses me sometimes – there was AT LEAST A HUNDRED whale sharks all around us! “Ahhhhh”, I could finally exhale with relief now. “Oh my God!”, I was screaming with the rest of the group next.

Immediately, we jumped in the ocean and dispersed in little groups to start the chase after several sharks. Boy, they swim fast! We were lucky that there were so many sharks that day: otherwise they would have to enforce their usual rule – 2 people per whale shark for as long as you keep up swimming with it, then you are taken back on the boat, approach the shark again and the next 2 people go in. We, on the other hand, spent hours in the water! I got exhausted after about an hour and a half and watched the rest of the swim from the comfort of the boat, but our videographers were there until the very last – three and a half hours without any break!

We asked why it is not allowed to scuba dive with whale sharks, only snorkeling is permitted. It turns out that scuba can actually harm the animals. As there are filter feeders, they keep their mouth constantly open. Consequently, if the shark accidentally swallows the bubbles produced by scuba diving, this can interfere with its digestive system.

Whale sharks are HUGE! I knew that whale shark (rhincodon typus) is the largest living fish species, but before you actually see one, you cannot even imagine the grandeur of this magnificent animal – they can apparently reach 42 feet in size and weigh 79,000 pounds! They are not scary though. Despite their formidable size and 4,000 teeth (no, it’s not a mistake, they do have 4,000 tiny toothpick-size teeth), whale sharks don’t emanate any subliminal signals of danger. On the contrary, they radiate great peacefulness – you feel like time doesn’t exist anymore, you are unquestionably “here and now”, the best set-up for a Buddhist meditation.

VERDICT: SWIMMING WITH THE MARINE GIANT IS A HUMBLING AND PEACEFUL EXPERIENCE!

Dive Log – Day 4

Snorkeling with whale sharks: Cancun-Holbox-Isla Mujeres; duration – 3.5 hours; visibility – excellent.

Closing sentiment

Sometimes we forget that our world is full of miracles… Adventures like this is a good reminder that we are part of this natural wonder. We just have to step outside the box we tend to put ourselves into, open up our horizons, and enrich our life one little magical moment at a time.

The applied power of social networking

A little over a month ago, when I just started my Twitter “career” as Dive Cooperative, I “met” Nadia, a young lady who owns and manages a “scuba diver online blog and community” (as they describe themselves), Scuba Diver Life. The first thing you do when you connect on Twitter is reconnect through Facebook that makes a more elaborate conversation possible. As I looked at the Scuba Diver Life FB page I was very impressed: 25,000 fans! I felt like I’ve struck gold with this connection – such exposure is great for us. Little did I know…

At some point, I re-posted somebody’s cool photo of whale sharks, and captioned it, “And we can take you there!” Nadia was immediately interested and we started a conversation that quickly turned into planning a big dive trip together. We decided that the trip will include diving in Cozumel for one day, diving cenotes in Playa-del-Carmen for the next day, diving Underwater Museum in Cancun for the third day, and the grand finale on the fourth day will be snorkeling with whale sharks. It sounded “epic” – Nadia’s termJ - and she kept saying it was a dream trip. So we named it Dream Extreme.

The itinerary sounded great, but we needed to assemble a group of divers to make it possible cost-wise (we agreed that she’d dive in exchange for professional videos that she was planning to take for her website and professional photos). The problem was that we had only 3 weeks to promote it and the price of the trip per person was $750 for only 4 days (and that’s not including accommodations or air fare)… I totally didn’t expect any success with this endeavor this year – I thought, it’s OK, let me find good partners for all the locations (Playa, Cancun, etc.) and figure out all the costs and logistics so that we can easily arrange it for next year. But…

IT WORKED! In only 3 weeks we had a group of 8 people! Some came through Facebook, some through friend’s recommendation, some just planned to come dive to Cozumel during those dates, but I diverted them into this trip instead. I was stunned by how easily everybody agreed to pay this money – it’s so good to know that people actually value personalized service when they don’t have to lift a finger or worry about anything – everything is arranged for them, all the transportation, lunches, schedule, etc. We decided that I should go with them on the entire trip to make sure everything goes well and take care of any issues that may arise, basically, to be their “concierge service”. We put a lot of work into the promotion, but it was so worth it!

This trip is yet another proof for me that social networking is an amazing tool in business nowadays. In addition to all the trip participants, I also met an absolutely great partner for our cenotes and whale sharks activities – Eduardo from Cancun. He is Mexican, but of this rare breed that actually responds to emails and is very proactive and super helpful. The big reason why our dive shop is going to be a big success soon is our customer service. In this country, most business owners display strangely negligent behavior as far as communication with customers is concerned. For example, I wanted to take a sailfish excursion in Cancun in January. So I emailed the guy – still waiting for his response… Also, wanted to take a yoga instructor course in March, and it’s a lot of money - $3,000 - but apparently nobody cares about getting any money from me… This is very weird and outrageous to me, but nobody here seems to be bothered by it – “it is what it is, what are you going to do, such is life”.

So when Eduardo responded to my first email within a couple of hours from his iPad, I was slightly shocked. My surprise increased when I opened the email and read through amazingly coherent and detailed answers to each of my questions (usually, if you are lucky to get any response, it barely covers one topic you are interested in, so you have to be careful and ask only concise questions in a whole serious of short emails, otherwise – total failure of communication is guaranteed). I knew right away that we can partner with him for the project! When we finally met on the trip in Playa-del-Carmen, he said the same thing – that he was very pleased with my emails and that’s why he decided to work with us and give us great prices and possibly expand our relationship beyond the scope of this project into the diving he wants to do in Cozumel. Wow, the power of the written word…J

Anyway, a lot of great things have actually come out of our very first organized trip-excursion:

• We found great partners in Yucatan to make more amazing excursions possible for our clients, ensuring the highest level of service and good prices.
• We made great connections with all the divers who joined this trip, and all of them plan to return to Cozumel in the near future.
• We will get 5 professional videos about every activity we did on this trip. Those videos will be published on www.youtube.com, www.scubadiverlife.com, www.vimeo.com, Facebook, Twitter, doing some unquestionable good for our exposure.
• We were interviewed by Scuba Diver Life and are now able to spread the word about Cozumel diving and Dive Cooperative vision.
• We will get some professional photos that we can turn into posters for our dive shop.
• We did make some profit.
• It generated some interest even before the big exposure that we'll get soon through all the videos, and we are already planning the same trip with a UK free-diving photographer for next summer!

In other words, it was a complete success!

I’m more and more fascinated with the opportunities social networking presents us with nowadays. I feel that it’s actually much easier now to meet the “right” people than it used to be back in the day when you had to go to different functions to “schmooze”. Of course, people do it now too, but a lot has shifted into the online space and it opens up new doors, includes people who don’t really like to schmooze and would never go to a function and may be shy to even talk to you in person, but online they feel free, safe and unstoppable. Thank God for Mark Zuckerberg!

P.S. It's funny how life works. For years and years I had this idea to create a travel agency that would offer very personalized services for your trip to Saint-Petersubrg: create very customized itineraries, recommend local restaurants, act as a concierge service for travelers while they are in town. Now I start a diving business, and all of a sudden I find myself doing exactly what I always wanted to do, just not in Saint-Petersburg. I didn't realize it at first even, only half way through the whole project I was like, "Wait a second..." Interesting.

The silent world

When I first mentioned I was considering a silent retreat at a dinner party around 6 years ago, there was a second of complete silence and then my friends burst out laughing. “You cannot live without your phone for 5 minutes! How are you going to handle a week of complete silence?” Good point, but at that time, right after my ex-husband #2 and I had split, I was desperate to find a quick and effective solution to my devastation and jumped excitedly at every “healing” idea. The two options I contemplated the most were a year-long around-the-world cruise and the silent retreat.

The silent retreat sounded very appealing. I had spent almost a year in frustrated, confused and totally useless conversations with my ex-husband that were intended to “save the marriage” but in fact just served as an outlet for all the energy behind the impending separation. Then, there were another several months of enraged, grief-stricken and tear-filled talks with my friends about the sudden craziness of our divorce. Naturally, I felt entitled to some quiet time in an all-inclusive (technically) lodge tucked in a beautiful forest Upstate New York.

I ended up going on a 10-day cruise with Tanya instead. It didn’t offer any solution to my abandonment issues, but it was an amazingly fun experience, highlights of which featured Tanya and I playing into the suspicion of our dinner table mates that we might be lesbians, and our alcohol bill of almost a $1,000 at the end of the trip. Oh, those yummy martinis!

But the silent retreat idea infiltrated my mind. I wasn’t obsessed with it, but I kept going back to consider this experiment once in a while, for the past 6 years. The time never seemed to be right though, and little by little I made my peace with the fact that it’ll always stay on my “Cool things that I’ll never do” list. Until all of a sudden, a couple of weeks ago I realized that here and now was the perfect time to do it! And I did it.

It wasn’t exactly the same thing that a beautiful Upstate New York lodge would offer. There were no people preparing healthy food for you, there was no collective energy produced by group meditation, there was no long walks in the forest. I did it all by myself, at my home here in Cozumel.

I had enough sense to share my intention with my therapist, who – as it turned out – apparently went on a week-long silent retreat once. She gave me some pointers that I wouldn’t ever think of myself. Together, we planned a routine for my 3 days of silence. She also warned me that it is not uncommon to fixate on one silly thought – for example, “I have a black bicycle” – and get totally obsessed with it to a point that you absolutely cannot get it out of your mind. Apparently, it is the only time when you are allowed to talk to somebody (a special counselor) when you are on an organized group silent retreat. After they help you release the invading thought, you go back to the world of silence.

Well, there’s really not much to write about. After all, it was exactly what it sounds – 3 days of silence. I didn’t have any WOW insights or powerful revelations, but there is something inexplicable in the silence that your body and mind apparently feed on.

Routine

It’s amazing how meaningless time becomes when you have absolutely nothing to occupy yourself with: no emails, no googling, no books, no radio, no movies. All you are “allowed” to do is meditate. This is very unusual, to say the least.

I set my alarm for 5AM (my therapist informed me that at the organized retreats this is considered the best time for the morning meditation) and woke up when it was still very dark outside. That reminded me waking up for school in winter, when my mom literally had to drag me out of bed every morning after multiple failures to appeal to my conscience. There’s no conscience when it’s still pitch black out! Your whole being considers this condition “night”. Of course, I was quickly reminded that I wasn’t in St.Petersburg in winter the second I stepped out on my terrace to go sit by the ocean. Even at 5AM this place is sticky hot. On the other hand, it was really my only window of opportunity to enjoy nature – I fell asleep at 8PM every night, because I woke up so early and, well, because there was really nothing to do!

From 5AM till 7AM I would be sitting on a stone in the ocean (literally), meditating, or trying to. I found it much easier to get into meditation here than in my room. Somehow I get almost immediately lulled by the sound of the ocean and can stay in this “trance” forever.

Then, I did yoga at 7AM at the beach, and went back inside for the rest of the day. I would even shut the metal curtains outside my windows, because otherwise it gets unbearably hot during the day, as my windows face the west side and the apartment gets baked in the sunlight. So I was confined to a complete darkness of the room, which was kind of conducive to the purpose of my exercise.

I would have breakfast at 8AM and go back to the yoga mat for another meditation. I alternated between Vipassana (insight) meditation, which is simply sitting and observing your thoughts and various guided meditations that I had downloaded from www.soundstrue.com for this very purpose.

Many people erroneously assume that meditation is all about achieving this state where you don’t have any thoughts. This is not true. I don’t even believe it’s possible to stop thinking altogether, no matter how spiritually advanced you are. A mind is a mind, and its function is to think. Meditation is about being a witness to your thought process and gaining control over the train of your thoughts, learning gradually how to bring your “stray” thoughts back into this moment of here and now, which is really the only moment that matters. One thought from a guided meditation really resonated with me, although I’ve heard it a million times before: past doesn’t exist anymore, future doesn’t exist yet, the only thing that is truly real is now. It’s all in our mind. Sometimes I think that The Matrix is not that far from the reality of things…

Anyway, I would meditate from 8.30AM till about noon, have lunch and perform the next thing on my agenda… “free time”. It’s actually funny. Time free from what exactly? I guess, free from the other 3 activities of the day – sleeping, eating, meditating. It’s not like you can occupy yourself with anything during this silent retreat, that’s the whole point – no usual 21^st century distractions – it’s just yourself… During my “free time” on the first day I fell asleep for like 4 hours, but the next 2 days I would just sit on my bed doing nothing. Just thinking, witnessing my thoughts. For about 2-3 hours. Then back to formal meditation, then dinner, then more meditation and sleep.

Day 2: Rinse, repeat.

Day 3: Rinse, repeat.

Ironically, I’m writing all of this in the buzzing of El Coffee, THE coffee shop on the island – not that there are no others, but this one is extremely happening, always full and lively.

Insights

I had no mind-shattering insights during those three days, but I have to say that for days and days afterwards things have been coming up. I guess, I set something inside me in motion: my dreams, my thoughts, my observations – it’s not like they are drastically different from before, but really something has changed, I just cannot pinpoint what exactly it is.

I was surprised how easy it was for me to do this though: at the end of the 3^rd day I was kind of sad that it’s getting over and thought that next time I’d definitely do a week (so I suppose, there will be a next timeJ). I didn’t really expect to be OK with not doing anything, just being, but you know, it’s not that bad!J The whole experience was very educational and peaceful and I think everybody should try to do it, although of course it’s so tough to create time for this type of thing in our busy lives. If you decide to do it, a word of caution – when you get back “into the world” after your silent retreat, do it very carefully and slowly. I wasn’t thinking about it and when I woke up on Friday, opened up my computer and immersed into reading emails and FB and chatting on Twitter and this and that – the usual – I got hit by a terrible heavy anxiety, and I’m not really an anxious person by nature. It was a horribly unpleasant feeling that came absolutely out of nowhere and wasn’t connected to anything in particular. It possessed me for hours until it finally disappeared as suddenly as it came in after my second dive around 4PM. I didn’t enjoy that.

On cooking

I’m not a very big fan of Mexican food. In fact, I’m not a fan of Mexican food at all, and it’s only over the past two years – out of necessity, you might say – I learned to be OK with it. I also discovered all these Cozumel home-style eateries, so it’s much more manageable for me now. Yet once in a while I feel like I’ve just had it. I look at the menu and think, “No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Hell no! Argh, still no…”

The problem with Cozumel is that there’s no cuisine variety on the island. Naturally, most of the restaurants are Mexican. And the only other good option that is well and deliciously represented is Italian. Which would be great, except I don’t like Italian that much either. No, wrong. It’s not that I don’t like it, I just cannot consume a lot of it – it has too much carbs for me. And it’s not about gaining weight (I’d actually appreciate that right now), but since I was a child I really never could eat a lot of pasta or bread or anything doughey. The only carb I’m in love with is potato. How cliché. What else do you expect from a Russian?

I’ve had it for the past couple of weeks and after turning my nose away from every meal on restaurant menus, I finally decided to cook at home. I’m a gadget person, so I feel like I cannot just cook in a pot or a pan – I need a device. It was a slow cooker in NYC, but since here electricity is pretty expensive (which could be totally overlooked by the way if only I found a slow cooker in any of the Cozumel stores) I bought a pressure cooker. I discovered that every American or Mexican has memories of their grandmother pressure cooking something delicious. I have no such recollections – Russian grandmothers never used anything like this, and the first mention of the healthy pressure cooked meal appeared with Zepter after the Soviet Union collapsed.

I googled some recipes. Not that many came up. I emailed my cooking advisers; they didn’t have a ton of recommendations either (but they both sighed nostalgically, “Ah, I remember my grandmother made this delicious…”). It looks like the art of pressure cooking is getting lost.

So I decided to experiment. After doing some research on cooking times for different meats and vegetables, I set out to modify some of my slow cooker recipes for my new pressure cooker. Surprisingly, it worked! And it came out as delicious as out of my slow cooker! The only sad thing is that the apartment doesn’t get permeated with delicious smells like with a slow cooker – there’s just not enough time, I guess (7 hours in a slow cooker is about 30 minutes in a pressure cooker). And the noise is spectacular. In the manual it says to start counting cooking time from the moment the pressure control starts to jiggle. Sounds pretty harmless. Sounds like the pressure control is going to do a little dance, actually. But whoa! Is this hissing, shrilling and whistling what is called “jiggle”? But now I’m used to this “jiggling” and can take it for 30 minutes without running to hide behind a couch in fear that the pressure control is going to pop out of the lid and fly straight into my head like some champagne cork. And these fast meals are really yummy. My favorite, so far, is beef stroganoff.

Beef stroganoff for pressure cooker

Serves 6-8

1 1/2 cups low-sodium beef broth
1/4 cup dried porcini mushrooms , rinsed and patted dry
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
2 onions , chopped fine
2 tablespoons tomato paste
1/2 cup white wine
1/3 cup soy sauce
4 pounds boneless beef chuck stew meat cut into 1 1/2-inch pieces (see note)
1 pound white mushrooms , cleaned and quartered
6 tablespoons all-purpose flour
1 1/2 cups sour cream
2 tablespoons chopped fresh dill leaves
Salt and pepper

1. Combine ½ cup broth and porcini in bowl and microwave until steamy and mushrooms have softened, about 1 minute. Line fine-mesh strainer with one paper towel and strain porcini, reserving liquid. Chop porcini fine and set aside.
2. Heat oil in large skillet over medium-high heat until shimmering. Cook onions and tomato paste, stirring frequently, until lightly browned, 7 to 10 minutes. Stir in wine, soy sauce, remaining broth, chopped porcini, and reserved porcini liquid, scraping up any browned bits with wooden spoon. Bring broth mixture to boil, then transfer to pressure cooker. Add beef and white mushrooms to pressure cooker, cover, and cook on medium flame until meat is tender, 30-40 minutes.
3. Skim fat from surface. Transfer 2 cups sauce from pressure cooker to large bowl and whisk in flour. Stir flour mixture into pressure cooker and cook, covered, until sauce thickens, about 5 minutes. Stir in sour cream and dill and season with salt and pepper. Serve.

When Liang and I lived in our Villa Fontana house we had a full kitchen. And we used it fully, except maybe the oven. No, the oven wasn’t used too often, maybe three times during all the six months we were there. In this apartment I don’t have an oven, just a stove. And naturally, all I want now is to cook something in the oven! Fortunately, there’s an electric oven of a decent size here, so game on! I decided to start with something simple and fast to cook (I haven’t seen the electricity bill just yet – in Cozumel you have to pay it every two months – but just in case I feel like I should be on the conservative side with all my appliances). Mustard pork roast, for example. I’ve never made it before, but it sounded pretty simple. And Cindy brought me a meat thermometer at some point, so I can be totally precise with my cooking time. Oh my god! I don’t think I know any other dish with the same deliciousness vs simplicity ratio. Well, I do now – it’s the pork roast marinated in Montreal steak seasoning. Anybody can make it (yes, Jennifer, you can make it too, just try!). And nobody will regret they tried.

Mustard pork roast

• Pre-heat the oven to 375F.

• Take the pork out of the fridge so that it reaches room temperature before you put it into the oven. Pat it dry with a paper towel.

• In a small bowl, mix grainy mustard, balsamic vinegar, olive oil and garlic.
Proportions: 2 tablespoons mustard, 1 tablespoon vinegar, 2 tablespoon olive oil, 3 garlic cloves minced for 1 pound of meat.

• Coat the roast liberally with the mixture from the small bowl, stick a meat thermometer in the center part, place the meat in a pan (preferably with a rack) and stick it in the oven.

• Cook until the meat reaches 170F. If you don’t have a meat thermometer, no worries, based on my experience 1.5lb roast is done in 1 hour and 2.5lb roast is done in an hour and a half.

• Let the roast sit for 15 minutes before cutting it.

• Send me a thank you email.

Pork roast marinated in Montreal steak seasoning

The same exact principle as above, but for marinade use 2 tablespoons Montreal steak seasoning, 2 tablespoons of olive oil and 1 tablespoon of soy sauce.

I have also made A TON of homefries for the past two weeks. You see, I have always loved the homefries my mother makes. They are just so delicious, and truly nobody else can make them like she does (and I’ve tried a lot of homefries in my life). When I go to Russia, I literally ask her to make homefries for me every single morning – yes, this is what I eat for breakfast over there. When I was little I spent a lot of weekends and school holidays at my aunt’s place, and her homefries were so different! The secret of my mom’s homefries is LOTS of butter and very thinly sliced potato. My aunt used to make it regular thickness and used canola oil – way too healthy to be good. I loved my aunt and always enjoyed weekends with her: she was a lot of fun and she cooked so well. But I always dreaded her homefries.

For years, I’ve struggled with trying to make the perfect homefries myself. I even bought a mandolin for perfect slicing. But I had never had any luck with the outcome. Until now! Finally, I’ve done it – my mom’s fries on my table in Mexico while my mother is in Russia! What made it possible I’ll never know. Maybe Mexican butter is the same as Russian butter. But this is irrelevant. The important fact is that now I am enjoying my food here so much. It’s kind of pathetic, but I actually moan every time I take the first forkful of homefries into my mouth, “Mmmmm, this is simply delicious!” I just have to remember to make an appointment to check my cholesterol soon.

Ah, and I'm forgetting my obsession with charlotte apple pie (well, at least in Russian it's called sharlotka). It has been my favorite pie since childhood and it's extremely easy to make. Beat 3 eggs with 1 cup of sugar until homogeneous and white; mix with 1 cup of flour; add a bit of baking soda tamed by lemon (of course, here I have to use lime, but it's OK); slice apples; mix it all together; stick in the oven for 45 minutes or so at 375F. Deliciousness!

Never say never...

I am a perfect illustration to the proverb “Never say never”. If you ever hear me say something like, “This is so ridiculous! I will NEVER get myself [a cell phone OR iPhone OR you can pretty much insert anything here]”, you can be 99% sure that at some point in the future I’ll be an obsessed owner of and an absolute expert on this [device]. I just had a chat with Dima about Google+, and I caught myself saying, “I just don’t see myself on this platform. How will I manage to move all my stuff from FB to…“ - I stopped realizing what’s going to happen soon. Eh, who am I kidding really? I’m going to be in love with Google+ as soon as I figure out who the hell it works!

This reminded me that I’m still in love with my iPhone. The applications for this device are absolutely incredible. Browsing the iPhone App Store is like going to Duane Reade: you never know what new amazingly useful gadget you’ll find there, but you know that it’ll be there and in a matter of seconds after stepping into the store you’ll be wondering how you could ever live without duvet corner clips, for example. Of course, you could sew buttons inside, tie the corners of your comforter or use any other way that this article suggests. But why, if there are now duvet corner clips available to you for only 5 bucks? Those clips and a thousand other tiny items you can find on Duane Reade shelves can clearly make your life so much simpler. And so can the App Store.

I used to pay 10 bucks for each 50-dive log book to record my dives. And I never really recorded them properly because it’s almost impossible to not smudge the pages with the pen on a boat, a wet boat. Now, I can record as many dives as I want, absolutely free, with DNA BLU app. And I don’t have to worry about smudging anything. Well, now I have to worry about not dumping my phone in the ocean, but that’s a minor detail and hopefully such a disaster will never occur.

I used to write my shopping lists in a note on my Nokia phone, but now I have SplashShopper that saves my lists, knows my favorite groceries and even allows me to email stuff to a friend who is shopping for me (yes, I have amazing friends).

I used to depend on a computer access for checking Facebook. Now I can do it anywhere with a Wi-Fi connection.

I can customize my retweets with Tweetlogix, I can track birthdays with iDay and my period with IP, I can look up any actor who has ever played in any movie with Movie Genie and IMDb, I can video call for free with my friends in Russia with Skype, I can track stars with Star Walk and identify annoyingly familiar songs with Shazam. And that is only a very small tip of the iceberg!

Some applications are really helpful and some are useless but just cool. My personal favorite in the latter category is Sleep Cycle. This is how it works. As you sleep you go through different states that range from deep sleep to light sleep. The state you are in when your alarm clock goes off will decide how tired you feel. A fixed alarm clock is a lottery. If you are lucky it wakes you in light sleep. If you are unlucky you are in deep sleep and barely conscious. Sleep Cycle creates a 30-minute wake-up phase that ends at your desired alarm time. So it tries to wake you in your lightest sleep state – the natural way to wake up where you feel rested and relaxed. Since you move differently in bed during the different sleep states, Sleep Cycle can use the sensitive accelerometer in your iPhone to monitor your movement to determine which state you are in. I usually sleep very well and wake up easily all fresh and full of energy, so how did I get sucked into this you ask me? Aha, simple: they have statistical reports on your sleep! With graphs! Now I know that on July 17^th, for example, I slept a total of 7 hours and 27 minutes (went to bed at 10:53 and woke up at 6:21), and my average total sleep time is 7 hours 14 minutes (as determined over the past 18 days). I rest my case.

The syncopation of rain

Why did I not write about this rain when it was pouring all the time? Why do I all of a sudden feel the need to share now, on a perfectly sunny day? My take on it is that now that this rainy madness is finally over, I feel a little nostalgic for the days that I was stranded at home because it was simply impossible to step outside. This nostalgia makes me idealize the days that it rained. Of course, in reality it was quite depressing. And upsetting too, since my friends had to cancel their trip on July 4^th and now god knows when they will be coming here…

It rained for 3 weeks straight. For a greater effect, I want to say that I have never seen so much water pour from the sky all at once, but I would be lying. I saw it in Brazil last year. It was actually worse over there. On the other hand, it lasted only a week. They said it was some kind of a tropical depression. It very well may have been, but it certainly wasn’t any kind of a tropical rain – this happy 15-minute downpour when you can see half of the sky being completely cloudless and blue and think that if you run fast to that side of the sky you can probably escape the drops, and you laugh at the idea. No, this time it rained all the time. Day after day, I fell asleep to the sound of raindrops and I woke up to the sound of raindrops. I almost forgot that I had an ocean view: it completely disappeared behind the misty shroud of this continuous downpour.

Apparently, a few windows in my house are leaking. I had to put rags under them so that I don’t step into puddles. The rain also tried to sneak in through the front door and the balcony door. So I had to put more rags to create the seal.

The rain didn’t bring any relief from the heat, and although some days were actually a bit cooler (around 72F), most of the time it was like a steam room outside. Once I peeked out the door wearing my glasses, and they immediately fogged up.

I felt hostage to the rain. I spent most of this time alone. Nobody wanted to venture out in such terrible weather, plus it was pretty dangerous: the town is not prepared for such amount of water and there are no proper drains in the streets, so flooding occurs very quickly, in a matter of minutes. I had to ride in the back of a scooter once and at some point we were up to our waist in the water, literally. Of course, I just had to do something stupid. I saw an opening in the sky and decided (based on nothing in particular, just sheer hope) that the rain would break for a couple of hours. So I set out to ride my bike. I didn’t have any specific reason to do this, just wanted to feel myself around something that is not my house. Some ten minutes later, as soon as I reached downtown, the downpour resumed. The stupidity of my riding the bike was quickly trumped by the stupidity of my wearing glasses instead of contacts! What was I thinking? It’s very difficult and dangerous to ride a bike in such rain, and it’s actually absolutely impossible to do it when you see absolutely nothing because your glasses don’t have wipers. So I walked the bike home, by feel. It took me about 30 minutes. Needless to say, I was drenched. That was my first and last attempt to get out of the house during those 3 weeks.

I watched a lot of movies and TV shows. That was good. I discovered this wonderful website – www.cuevana.tv. You can find a lot of old and new movies on it, and a lot of TV shows too, even Seinfeld! Although it’s a Mexican website and all the movie descriptions are in Spanish, don’t let it discourage you – everything is actually in English, just with Spanish subtitles which you can switch off. I don’t; it’s fun for me to watch something in English and read it in Spanish right away, some translations are very illuminating.

I was happy that I didn’t have to work. In diving that is. Because diving happens any time, rain or shine. Unless, of course, the port is closed because of a storm. Javier had to work on some days and he looked miserable when he came over after.

I did a lot of social networking and wrote a lot of articles for our website.

I read a lot.

And STILL I had a lot of time left. I never fully realized before how much time social interactions and little errands take. If you stop by a little grocery with no lines to buy, say, apples, you’ll probably spend some time selecting them, fiddling for change to pay for them, saying hello and thank you and have a nice day to the cashier. Boom – 10 minutes of your day gone (or half an hour if you are in Mexico). If you stop by your office to say hi to Sherief, you come in, put your bike against the wall, sit down with a glass of water for a little chit-chat, and all of a sudden Javier comes in and a couple of other people stop by, and you chat and you laugh and you argue. Boom – at least 40 minutes of your day gone (or sometimes a couple of hours). And how many little things like this do we have to do during our regular day? I guess they all add up and we feel like we never have time for ourselves. At least, I feel this sometimes. But now that I was forced to be home alone with all this time for myself, I honestly didn’t know what to do with it.

I wasn’t bored. I never get bored, I don’t think I can even start to understand what “boredom” means. There’s always something to occupy yourself with, there’s always something interesting around or inside you to ponder. I just felt – and it’ll probably sound weird – like I had those unusual gaps of complete and pure emptiness in between my activities. Let me try to explain. Normally, I kind of smoothly go from one activity to the next, from one thought to the next, it just happens naturally, you just live your day sort of like by free associating. This time it was different. When one activity was finished, there was a distinct pause, during which I had to ask myself “So, what’s next?” The answer would come almost immediately, but the point is that I HAD to ask it, it didn’t just flow naturally. It felt strange.

It is also strange that I feel so compelled to write about this rain. But maybe it’s not that strange. After all, it was really beautiful, on many-many levels…

Working in Spanish - a leap of faith

My relationship with the Spanish language is still complicated. I understand everything (well, unless somebody starts speaking with a terrible Mayan accent that I don’t think is humanly possible to understand anyway). I freely speak Spanish when I know that the person doesn’t speak English at all. But when Liang, Sherief and Javier start speaking Spanish at our gatherings, I always participate in English. Cannot really explain why. One on one with Javier I feel free to speak Spanish sometimes, but then he always gets super excited and starts saying how “good” my pronunciation is and how cute I look and sound, that it embarrasses me, so yet again I prefer to switch. It’s funny really, because he always speaks to me in Spanish, and I almost always respond in English. I wonder what somebody who witnesses our conversations may think about this bizarre linguistic interaction.

Working in Spanish though is a totally different ball game. You have to know all the correct terminology and be 100% sure that you understand everything and respond adequately and not in a way that can potentially be misinterpreted. I don’t think my Spanish is there just yet. That is why when Sherief called me the other day and said, “Can you do an Open Water course with a couple from Mexico City? It’s no problem for you to do it in Spanish, right?” I firmly said, “NO WAY”.

With diving it’s even more tricky, especially if this is your students’ first time underwater. One of the most important tasks for a dive instructor is to make students feel SAFE. And how can you feel safe if you don’t understand what exactly your instructor is trying to convey to you, or if you see that the instructor doesn’t fully understand what you are asking or concerned about? Tough…

After I presented my arguments to both Sherief and Javier, they both considered them for a very brief moment, and then said, almost in unison, “That’s bullshit, you can totally do it! Eventually, you’ll have to do courses in Spanish, so now is as good of a time as it will ever be for you to start. Just do it!” Aha… I thought, OK, we have a business together so supposedly they care about this company being professional and having a good reputation. Maybe my Spanish is really not that bad and maybe I CAN do it then? “Fine, - I said. – But if this turns into a complete disaster, you are responsible!” They laughed.

It wasn’t a disaster. In fact, it was a very fun experience. The young couple from Mexico City was super nice and friendly, and they didn’t really speak English, so there was no way to switch between languages back and forth (I’m glad, actually, because this switching is confusing for the brain, I think, although mine seems to be very much used to it with all the Russian-English concoction we speak in NYC). I had to focus on Spanish and I did a good job. Of course, I almost had a panic attack the morning before the first class when I woke up at 5AM to review all the dive terms and idioms I’d learned the day before (yes, I had only one day to prepare) and realized that I didn’t remember anything. I just couldn’t produce anything! Luckily, it was just a temporary stupor, and it all rushed back pretty soon after I forced myself to relax.

The next two days I spent almost all the time with the guys. It is pretty difficult to squeeze a 4-day course into 2 days that they had available, and for me it’s even more difficult to do it in a totally foreign language. The Open Water course includes a lot of theory, and usually students read the manual before coming here to do their training dives, with all the theory exercises accomplished and quizzes done. But these two were completely unprepared. To speed things up I had to explain all the relevant points in a class setting. We also did all the exercises together. That was a bit challenging, but I was actually more worried about the water part – I didn’t want to linguistically fail at making them feel safe.

That went well, too. I am just really lucky - both of them feel very comfortable in the water and they are fast learners, too. So it wasn’t difficult for them to pick up all the necessary underwater techniques, making it possible to complete the course in only two days. Not even once did they show me that they were having a difficult time understanding me, although naturally I made some mistakes. The funny part is that while in “normal” life I feel super self-conscious about the mistakes I may potentially make and that is why I just shut up before even trying to say anything, this setting made a Spanish chatter-box out of me. Partly, it’s the amount of information that you have to transfer into your student’s head, but partly, I believe, I was just really enjoying hearing myself speak and didn’t want to stopJ.

It was a lot of work and the only time I had for myself is watching sunsets really, but it was so much fun! I’m so happy that I’m surrounded by people who push me to do things that I would never take on if it were solely up to me. It’s all about taking a leap of faith, and leaping is so much easier when you see that your friends genuinely believe in you.

After the course I even spoke with Javier for a whole 2-3 days only in Spanish, which made him very happy and proud, but then I slid back into my regular behavior.