Week #6

October 29 - November 6

Hard to believe but halfway through! 6 weeks down and 6 to go and I finally got my open water diving certification this week!!! 

I did 3 more dives this week- one at Playa Eden, the same place as my first dive, and two at Samana, where I had snorkeled before but never dove. On the first dive at Samana you can swim over to a wall of coral and the second dive is a shallow wreck dive. I practiced more skills on each of these dives. At the wall we saw a bunch of brightly colored fish and awesome brain coral. The wreck at Samana is a ferry that sunk about 15 years ago carrying too much cement over to the island nearby- Cayo Levantado- for the all-inclusive resort. It is covered in fish and surrounded by coral gardens as well which is awesome! It felt good to see interesting things on my dives this week.

Besides diving, we didn’t do that much at work this week. We went a couple times to check the visibility at the beaches near the dive shop by snorkeling because Paul told us to, but it was pretty much busy work to get us out of the way. The visibility was not clear at all, and so we were unable to get in more dives in Las Terrenas. 

In unrelated to work news- the real date of Halloween was this week, and the main tourist clubs had Halloween costume parties with full out skeleton and spider web decorations. All the Dominicans were in costumes even though it was a Wednesday, but they didn’t care! 

In other news we also mailed in our absentee ballots this week! 

Week #5

October 22- 28

(Sorry there are more pictures coming!)

So sorry everybody it has been so long since I've written!! I am still alive and happy and having a good and busy time here in Las Terrenas surviving the heat and mosquitoes! As for our fifth week here, we didn’t actually do that much, although I did also have my first real dive in the ocean which was exciting! We did some skills but mostly just swam around at the beach close to the dive shop called Playa Eden (it was a shore dive). There isn't much to see there, but it was good to get more skills in. This dive isn't that deep, only around 7 meters at the maximum depth which was actually good for my first dive. The visibility was much clearer than I have seen it before, but not as clear as it could have been. 

Although the actual date of Halloween wasn’t this week, on Saturday the volunteers had a Halloween costume party where we carved pineapples and watermelons! (Almostttt as good as my moms party - just kidding it was nowhere close, but we still had fun!) 

We spent our time off this week at Playa Bonita almost every day, as it is super easy for us to get to and still always amazing to jump into the refreshing ocean! We love staying at the beach to watch the sunset even though there are many many mosquitoes out as it gets dark! Watching the sun come down through the palm trees though is always beautiful.