Kicker Rock and Miss. International Carnaval

It has been quite the day here. This morning, I got up bright and early to scuba dive at Kicker Rock. It was an amazing experience. I put some pictures at the bottom of this post, but they really do not do it justice. We did two dives, and the second one was unreal. During the second dive, we swam into a school of fish. This particular school has been in that spot for two years. If I had to guess how many fish were in the school, it would be in the hundreds of thousands. It was crazy. We swam right up into the school, and the fish parted so we could go in the middle. As soon as we were far enough inside, the fish closed the gap. We were literally surrounded by a circle of fish. You couldn’t see anything. It was the craziest thing. I have a really cool video that I am going to try to upload at some point, but I make no promises. I did figure out the wifi password to the scuba shop we’ve been doing our dives with, and they have great wifi (my house/school doesn’t), so I’m going to be sneaking over there early in the morning at some point with my laptop so I can sit outside and upload things. During the dive, we also saw 13 blacktip sharks, 1 galapagos shark, and 2 hammerhead sharks!

This may sound nuts, but I feel so much safer in the water than on top of it. Maybe this could be classified as “fear of the unknown”, but I definitely was more nervous about what was below me when I was swimming around on top of the water by Kicker Rock than what was right in front of me when I was 60 feet underwater.

That was the first part of the day. After we got back, there was a huge party on Playa Mann because of Carnaval! It was crazy!! There are people everywhere, tons of delicious street food, lots of beer, and the infamous Miss. International Carnaval competition. Of course I was going to enter! There were two categories I had to compete in. The first was “recyclables”. I channeled my inner Kat Canavan as I made an outfit out of what I had in my backpack and what plants were on the ground. The second category was the swimsuit competition. Since I had just come from scuba diving, I was wearing my Jolyn bathing suit meant for active wear (love you Jolyn).  It was perfect because I could strut my stuff on stage. Being the spunky person I am, I managed to get 2^nd place! Although personally, I think the whole thing was rigged. The girl who won was Miss. San Cristóbal! So she was already the island pageant queen! And she wasn’t international! I still got a teddy bear and a bag full of tourist stuff though so I was happy. And, it made me feel better that every person in my school told me I got robbed. I don’t have any pictures, but my friends do, so I am definitely going to try to get my hands on those at some point. It was really silly and fun. I definitely underestimated the unwanted male attention I would get afterwards though. As soon as I got down from the stage, a bunch of guys picked me up and ran around with me and tried to hand me a bunch of drinks. No gracias! My host family thought the whole thing was very funny at least, and I had a blast.

Everyone tonight is going out to the discotek, but I am absolutely 100% exhausted. Apparently, tomorrow is another day of partying from 8 am to midnight, but that’s not going to fly because I have a midterm on Wednesday! Booooo. Since my professor saw my entire pageant routine (can you say embarrassing) maybe she’ll give us a break and not make the exam as difficult as she said it was going to be.