A brave new adventure begins: an underwater adventure, an adventure to fulfill lifelong dreams.

Day 16 – Diving school, Day 1:
Read the text book, watch related video, do some quizzes – this all takes you back to time you were in driving school over a decade ago. Are diving and driving related? Everything is being oversimplified so that even that dumbest idiot from the backwater village can understand everything. Nothing is challenging and everything seems too easy, this is going to be boring.

Oh boy were you wrong. Once again the practical application forced the fool on his knees. You went to the pool of a nearby hotel to try out the gear in water for the first time. You had been told that breathing in would be the hard part, and as asthmatic you were rather scared of the possible consequences of the breathing apparatus, but no one had hinted me how hard it was to exhale under water! You trained some basic skills that are needed to cope with problems that might arise underwater but the only thing that actually went through your mind was: “Jeesus Mother Fucking Christ this stuff is dangerous!” Eventually you got some sorta hang of things, though more repetitions would have definitely been worth the extra effort. The lesson you learned was to keep calm, and keep breathing (insert that meme thingie here if you wish.)

Day 17 – Diving school, Day 2:
Holy shit, the instructor has decided to dump you straight into the open ocean as the first thing of our second day, close to lunacy, SCARY! You weren’t really feeling confident about the first open water dive and of your ability to cope with it, but somehow you went along with it anyways. Or actually you were supposed to do two dives and related skills that day… The first feeling of hitting the water and getting water in your nose and throat – panic. You try to climb back into the boat, the instructor tries to pull you back from the brink of insanity, to pull you under water to calm down like you had trained. You get a grip of yourself, just barely. Underwater world shows itself to you for the first time as murky, dark water with one bright line leading down to the abyss – panic is creeping in again. Going further and further bellow the waves reveals a bottom dotted with rocks on golden sand. There are sea creatures everywhere.You can barely contain your excitement, you are finally here after all those years of dreaming of this and it is beautiful, just like in your dreams. Then you are brought back to reality by the instructor who demands you to complete the tasks given.They are hard. More water in the nose. But this time you can take it and manage to do the things required. Time for some exploration – so many colors, shapes and patterns. You wish you could see better, but enjoy it with your every labored breath. Half an hour and half a tank of air passes in an instant. Time to get back. You notice weird tingling sensation in your hands, you get worried really worried. Up on the surface you tell about this to the instructor, who has an answer ready – you touched something you shouldn’t have. You can’t do another dive, even if it was scheduled. You feel sick, sea sickness is here.

Back in the shore you get treatment and things start to normalize.You are both thrilled and scared at the same time. Time to get some rest and prepare for the second pool session in the afternoon. In th pool you end up getting water in your nose again, a lot this time, and repeatedly. You just cannot figure out functioning without the mask and the instructor cuts some slack to you. Other tasks work well and you have a feeling that you are starting to get a hang of it.

Day 18 – Diving school, Day 3:
You have three dives planned so that you could complete the course before you leave the city. Three seems way too challenging and you make plans of returning a short while after New Year to complete course. You head out to the sea for your dive.The boat is once again jumping up and down on the waves and smiting your already sore bottom. The sea is kinda rough again, but this time you are prepared. You managed it without problems! The descend is easy, though you bump into an evil jelly fish, it hurts but not enough to quit. At the bottom things are a bit rougher than yesterday and you are not alone. You manage the skills ok, though your instructor has to go back and forth on the surface and you are left with the other instructor. The other instructor is confusing, the whole situation is confusing. You get to do less things than you wish before it is time to go. On the way up you get these weird sensations again, maybe it is the decompression sickness you read about yesterday, or maybe it is something even worse. You surface further away from the ship than you realized, swimming on the surface is rather hard. The instructor does not agree with your concerns and dismisses em as more jellyfishes. You are not sure and will feel the doubt growing by the day as you head to spend the New Year elsewhere.

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Day 25 – Diving school, Day 4:
You are back, just like Arnold in that old movie nobody remembers. Part of you wants to quit, but then on the other hand you are not one to give up easily. You gear up for the remaining dives, even though you have your doubts, which you do not know how to communicate. Everything goes fine until it is time to dive. Something is not right, things are not working as they should. You still manage to do the first planned part of the day, but when it comes time to get really started, things start to seem really fucked up – this time it is the gear, not your health. You surface and try and try to fix it, even swapping out the item, just to make things even worse. You have to go to cool down on the boat. The instructor tells that this is it for the day, and proceeds to do the remaining dives with another diver. All that time you are on the boat, chanting your mantra “I shall not give up, tomorrow I’ll do it.”

Day 27 – Diving school, Day 5:
Except that you wont, not after you burned your skin on the dive boat. That is it, you have failed. The abyss has claimed what belongs to it. All you can do is salvaging what you can. You do the final exam of the course and reach one level lower certificate that what you aimed for + a referral in case you’d want to hit replay anytime soon. You are happy that you got at the least something out of this. You start planning on getting your own gear. Maybe some day…