Diving marathon

Today another record has fallen. 8 dives in one day (actually not even one - from 9 AM to 2 PM). It was typical way of fattening up our logbooks ;-). Still, it was nice to check how it is.
We used only 3 tanks. First for 3 dives, second for 4 dives!!! :-D and third for just 1 dive (time has run out). Each dive lasted at least 30 minutes and the depth was less than 15 meters. Only the last dive was deeper - 32 meters.
Encounters? Nothing special accept of huge 1.5 - 2 meter long sea turtle up close. It was resting under the rock with 3/4 of it's body sticking out ;-) What a nice create. It didn't even bother with our presence.

86 dives logged and counting...

Nature vs Man - 1:0

Today I experienced my first typhoon. Weather forecast was saying that a typhoon was going to hit Manila today. Schools, public institutions and companies were shut down for a day. It started to rain heavily the evening before. When I woke up in the morning it was still raining heavily. I decided to work from home and kept doing so until the power was cut off and internet access with it.
So I had plenty of time to admire the forces of nature unleashing their wrath. Strong wind joined the rain. It was similar to strongest storms I saw in Poland. Then wind and rain became stronger. It looked like a wall of water coming from the sky. When I thought it's the worst it can get... it got worse ;-)
Wind was very strong (I don't know how fast but looked like way above 100 km/h). For the first time in my life I saw rain "falling up" for moments, due to wind turbulence. Roof tops and other parts of buildings were flying around like in "Day after tomorrow". My balcony door was shaking so strong and noisy that I was afraid it's going to break.
Then around 5 PM it quieted down. I went out to buy some food and candles (power was still down) but all the stores were closed. I found just one place open running on power generator. Candles were out of stock ;-)
There was no single street without fallen trees (entire trees not just branches). No wonder they killed the power...
I had just one impression after. It was morbidly impressive to watch how nature "kills" entire 17 million population city just in half a day. Manila was practically out of operation this day. Offices and stores were closed, people stayed inside and even traffic disappeared (this is weird for this city ;-).
Locals told me that this typhoon was just moderate. Sometimes there are 3 of them coming in a row and the "fun" lasts for a week. I think I got a taste and don't want to see more ;-)

Movies

I had this idea for some time to rate the movies I've seen here. I noticed that most of the movies even these supposedly to be hits are so lousy that I don't remember them just after walking out of the screening room. But there are some exceptions.

Crank - 9.5/10 great! great! great movie. Something in between Pulp Fiction, Snatch and Kill Bill. Take all the best parts of these movies put it in the new one, combine with twisted screen play and camera operation and you'll get Crank. You can either love it or hate it. There is nothing in between.

Flyboys - 5/10. The closest movie to compare this one to would be Pearl Harbor, but this one is more 'European' since it happens during World War I. Air fight scenes are great but they are becoming boring at the end of the movie. Besides them there is bunch of long, kinda boring scenes and another couple of annoying small details (like running from attacking fighter in a straight line, not aside). All together it was worth putting in this blog ;-)

Previous movies I'll just skip. None of them would get anything more than 3. Maybe with exception of Devil Wears Prada.

Dive! Dive! Dive!

Finally I'm getting to dive more last weeks. I reached the status of almost one dive trip per weekend. I think I made around 30 dives since I came here. Recent weekends were really nice and several new personal records has been made:

1. Biggest number of dives in one day: 6
2. 2 night dives in one day
3. First night dive without a flash light (hehehe this is fun. I started to like night dives better than day ones due to this one)
4. The longest dive. 97 minutes under water on 1 tank
5. First octopus seen in its natural habitat
6. Sun burn so strong that my head and face swell (3mm hair cut doesn't go well with sun tuning here)
7. First costal/reef clean up dive during International Costal Cleanup day
8. Some more I can't remember right now... maybe will edit later

Current number of logged dives - 78 and counting
Target - 100 by the new year
Index 1500% vs. YE ;-)

First times

Hehehe... no it's not what you were thinking by reading the title of this post :-)

I wanted to share my experience from activities that I did for the first time.

Wall climbing

This is nice. I think I could start to like it and become addicted. Although my ass is a bit to heavy for this kind of sport I did well. It was an artificial wall but for a beginner it was okay. I started from easy ladder-like paths just to get acquainted with the equipment. Then I moved to more demanding paths. One is suppose to climb using only handles of same color - I deliberately ignored this role ;-) It was all easy until I tried the path with the cliff hanging at the top of it. Eh... this was hard. I got to reach over the cliff and catch the first two handles there but the next ones where too high and I fell (hanged on the line). It was a shame to see some people climbing the same path in few seconds using only one color handles and almost jumping over the cliff. Well... practice makes a champion :-)

Golf

This is the weirdest sport ever. The position itself if so unnatural that I didn't get the hang of it for I guess something like 3 hours. If you want to completely twist your body I recommend golf.
Beside that I had a beginners luck and was actually able to send the ball flying for the first 3 shots. The rest miserably failed :-(
But I'll try it again some other time...

Mahjong

Yes this game of a name that you got only to hear in the Internet. It's pretty popular here. I thought it has more to do with thinking and remembering but it really depends in 80% on luck. Nothing compared to Bridge. The game itself is nice though.
And here is a proof:

Informal and formal team off-sites

There were two team trips in July. It's already long time since they happened and I'm too lazy to even try to describe it better than Daniel did it in his blog (look here and search for the following titles: Team meeting in Tagaytay and Christian & Me-ann's despedida).

I just add couple of pictures that aren't there.

Me-ann's despedida pictures:










Tagaytay team meeting: (as you can see I proudly wear a farewell gift ;-)

40 degrees and overwhelming work

Sorry for not updating this blog for a longer time.
I got really sick for 2 weeks. For 5 days I had 40 degree fever that didn't go down even after taking anti fever pills and antibiotics. Combined with heavy cough it was the worse case of infection I can remember. In the worst moment I was coughing once per 5 seconds per average. This made sleeping impossible. I lost 6 kilos in less than 2 weeks. Eh...

There was a moment I was thinking I'm not going to make it ;-)

I had different thoughts, like:

a) it's probably SARS
b) did I have contact with any birds recently?
c) is tuberculosis still lethal
d) is it possible that local virus or bacteria mutated in my body creating something similar to Ebola...

This was my mood... I guess nothing new hehehe.
Any way once it was over the amount of work that flooded me successfully prevented me from adding any comments on this site. Hopefully it will change...