Day 2 of SCUBA training.
Finally slept in today - made it all the way to 730am! This is good. We had a great breakfast downstairs again - lots of fresh fruit and cereal creations.
After breakfast, we realized we had no food for lunch, so we walked a few blocks to a local grocery store and got everything you need for a quality lunch - bread, peanut butter, honey, crackers, and nuts.
Below is a picture of me making the entire loaf of bread into sandwiches. See if you can spot what we forgot to buy:
Hint - look at my utensils...oops!
After we finished making 9 peanut butter and honey sandwiches, we headed downstairs where our SCUBA instructor slash chauffeur picked us up and took us to the dive shop, pictured below
We started today with our in-the-water work, in this pool
It is the only indoor, heated, covered pool in Cairns (which today we decided is pronounced "Cans"). It goes from 4 feet deep on each edge to 10 feet deep in the middle. We were in the water for over two hours until we completed our pool work and were rewarded with a lunch break and the opportunity to get out of our wetsuits. Good news - we were able to get me in and out of mine in under 5 minutes today (yesterday took about 10 minutes - it was a little tight).
Here is where we ate our delicious lunch of peanut butter and honey
Very quaint, no? After lunch, we returned to the classroom for two and a half hours of video watching and exam taking. Exciting news - Stephen and I passed with flying colors - we both got As on our final written exam. All that stands between us and certification is the open water swim tomorrow.
Since our class consists of only the two of us, by 3pm we were done and on our way back to our hotel. After hanging up our swim suits, we decided rather than watching odd Australian television, it would be more exciting to visit the Australian Ukelele Festival right outside next to the weekly street fair. The concert/competition/festival was great - lots of good songs by Elton John and Bon Jovi and many others. The street fair was great - jewelry, paintings, hilarious tshirts, and other homemade crafts galore. This entire fair was centered around a public fountain/pool, that was about 75F - yet plenty of people were traipsing through it. Stephen and I were not so brave - claiming we were just too waterlogged from class this morning.
We then wandered through more of downtown central Cairns, and decided that since it was starting to rain and we didnt want to go back to our hotel just to watch tv or play cards, it would be better for us to just hole up in downtown.
We selected a local bar/restaurant called the Rattle N Hum - kind of seen above, as it had lots of sporting events being shown, each tried a local beer - Stephen had VB and I had a Beez Neez (pronounced "Bees Knees") while watching the locals come and go.
Around 530 we decided to grab dinner (mainly because I was hungry and convinced Stephen I'd be better company if I was well fed), and picked an outdoor Thai restaurant with a good menu.
That about sums up our fun from today - this may be our last post for a while - tomorrow we head out onto the outer Great Barrier Reef for 3 days, and then we start to stay in slightly lower end hotels, potentially limiting our internet capacity. Oh well, we'll see what happens!
Here's to us not being eaten by sharks - such as this:
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