20 meters Under the Sea Wrap up

Hello my friend. Where you from? Kentucky? Oh! Fried Chicken!!
That conversation is one thing I won't miss when I'm home.
Well, I'm back in Bangkok now. The rest of the dive course went great. We were in the pool the second day practicing breathing with our regulators, and learning skills etc that would make us more comfortable when we did our actual dives in the ocean. And make no mistake, this was a pool not an "ool" as everyone put their "p" in it. Some more discretely than others. The pool is also where you weed out some of the softies. An Irish lass from my group and a Canadian from another group got a bit claustrophobic and nervous breathing through the hose and practicing taking the goggles off underwater so they dropped out of the course. I took to it pretty easily. As long as you just relax, don't get tense and panic, you'll be fine. The third day we went out and did two actual dives. The first one was to about 14 metres and the second to about 10 (always do the deeper dives first). It was a cloudy day and was actually storming as we were underwater for the second dive. Add that to the fact that one guy (bloody English!!) took forever equalize properly (pop your ears during the descent) and the first two dives were ok. We practiced some more skills on the bottom and tried to maintain buoyancy as we swam. The last day, though, was when we took off the kiddie gloves and saw some action. It was a perfect day for diving w/ visibilty around 20 metres. We did 2 dives to 18 metres and I saw a couple white tipped reef sharks, a sting ray, an eel, great coral and lots of ther fish. Couldn't have asked for better. Even bought the DVD of the dive to show my true tourist colors and to have a memento. The last night, the whole grouped celebrated our Open Water PADI certification, and the next morning, I was on the morning ferry back to Bangkok, where I leave for the airport in 10 bleeping minutes.
What a trip it has been. No regrets at all about the places I visited or the length of time I spent in them. In fact,I would have liked longer. But all good tihngs must come to an end. I read the message board for UL Med School, and the first post was from this guy and it was titled: "Once a Cardinal, always a Cardinal". So, I think I'll be buying numerous Powerball tix when I get back to see if I can't get out.
All right. That's it for now. I'll talk to all y'all back stateside. Thanks for all the encouragement and suppport.

James