August 30th, 2010 by Solomon
So it has been over a year since I wrote on the blog. I keep meaning to get back into it but a blog is a lot of work, especially when you have all this life going on around you. A WHOLE BUNCH has happened in my life since last year, a lot of which I have not talked about because I have thought that it was personal and I didn´t really want to include personal stuff in the blog, but I guess the point of the blog is personal stuff.
I am going to do a short time-line of all the stuff that has been going on…Maybe I can go into it more in depth later.
So, starting about 3 years ago I got this idea in my head that I would like to go back to college, I sort of felt that there was something missing in my life and I thought that college would maybe be that thing. So I started to look into what it would take to get to go to the local college in Playa Del Carmen. Which led me to the Secretary of Education in Cancun:
The Secretary of Education wanted a whole long list of my vital records, starting with first grade on up to high-school. So I got in touch with my mother in the States and she didn´t have the records that I wanted but she suggested that I talk to the schools that I had attended. I got ahold of them and had them send me out a copy of the documents up until the 10th grade when I got my GED and started attending community college.
Note the part about GED and community college….we´ll get to that later. The secretary of education wanted my records translated and apostilled as well. I had no idea at the time what apostille is, but I found out. I think this is a good lead in for another post. Anyway, after getting the apostille and translation the SEP(Secretaria de Educación Publica) let me know that my GED was not valid in Mexico.
After a few frustrating(for me) phone calls to the director of the validation department of the SEP in Chetumal, the state capital, I resigned myself to the idea that I was not going to be able to use my GED to go to college here. So, since I am stubborn and I wanted to go to college, I continued down the path and started the mexican version of the GED program, which is a year and a half study on your own and take the tests type program.
So in July of 2008 I started this process, looking back on it I am glad I did because I am really sure that it helped my Spanish and got me into the routine of studying. Every one of the posts that you read that I published since that time, I wrote during the schooling process. In November of 2009 I finished and had met all of the pre-requisites of the Secretary of Education to start my higher education.
In January of 2010 I started university here in Playa Del Carmen in a small university, studying law. Its a 3-year program with a six month internship in the middle. Getting authorization from immigration to be a student AND work was a small miracle but it worked out. This could probably lead to a whole other post as well.
In February I got married to a wonderful woman. I had to jump through a few hoops in order to get immigration and the civil registry to let me marry a Mexican girl, but it all worked out. I think there is another separate post here as well. When we got married we didn´t invite our families because we knew that we wanted to actually have a larger ceremony on the beach later in the year when everything sort of calmed down a little bit.
We decided to have the wedding in Puerto Morelos on the beach and one day while there looking around for the right place to do it, my lovely bride suggested that we have the wedding in the church instead of the beach and then have a reception later. Which opened up a whole new can of worms, I am/was not catholic…so I became catholic.
So…between work, school and family I have been pretty busy. It has been hard to write lately. The motivation for this post is simple, I was listening to a talk by Kevin Smith(Clerks/Dogma/Chasing Amy) and he mentioned that the most important thing for anyone who thinks about being a writer is write. So I guess I better write.
Oh, that and this term I am starting an written communication class and am going to have to practice…so I might publish some posts in Spanish. Nothing that can´t be missed…maybe I will translate anyway.
Well, that´s all for now folks.
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June 30th, 2009 by Solomon
I just recently got certified to be a diver, after almost 4 years of living in Playa and thousands of questions from various friends and family about why I don’t dive. I am pretty happy with the outcome, I am not sure if I am going to be a dedicated diver, but I definately think it is something that will be good to pass a little bit of slow-season.
I did my first two dives(confined water) in a pool, like everyone else. I thought this part was pretty easy, but I did have some issues with bouyancy, I am a big guy and I seem to sink pretty well on my own. The major problem I seemed to have was that I kept trying to clear the water out of my mask by lifting the top of the mask and blowing with my nose, which is sort of the reverse of what I needed to be doing. I thought I got it figured out after a few tries, but it comes up later as a problem.
Now for an aside, sort of…the reason I was motivated to do this learning to dive thing is that my mother was learning to dive at home in the States and was coming down for a visit the day after she did her final certification dive. That meant that she would want to do some diving here, preferably with me, so I needed to get certified ASAP. Luckily, I had a good friend who had offered to give me the class, so I finally took her up on the offer.
As it turns out, my mother was not able to equalize the air pressure in her ears on her certification dive, so when she came down she was not yet a certified diver. We decided that we would do the last dives together, I talked to my friend and she said that would not be a problem, since it was pretty much the same thing for one person or two.
Since the first dives are all about testing dive skills and sort of getting oriented in the water, our instructor(who I might add her name later with her permission) suggested that we go to one of the local cenotes instead of the ocean for the dives. This takes care of a few problems, we avoid that pesky current while we are trying to figure out which way is up and all of the other subtleties of diving, and it is cheaper(I like cheaper). So, we picked Ponderosa cenote, at the Jardin del Eden for our dives.
This is what I look like in a wetsuit
The highlights of the first dives were the turtles floating around and seeming to really not know what these strange creatures were that were invading their space, the ducks that dove to the bottom of the cenote looking for little fish, and of course my complete lack of bouyancy control. I was up and down and all over the place, sometimes bouncing from a nice happy place looking at a something cool to floating uncontrolably towards the surface. After quite a bit of practice I managed to be able to stay wet for a reasonable period of time, though not completely in one place. I guess this is a skill that I will have to work on for a while.
On the next dive we went to Tortuga reef, which is in front of Xcaret. It was a good start, pretty interesting in terms of the creatures running around. Particularly I liked the current, which for some reason made it easier for me to stay in one place(at least vertically). I was severely underweighted, which meant that I was neutrally buoyant even with my BCD completely empty, which was fine for me when I was finally at depth, but to initially sink the first 5 meters was a big deal. The dive instructor actually had to pull my fin so I could get down on this dive.
Tortuga seemed to be what I would call drive-by diving, because the current is moving you along and everything that you are looking at is actually below you, so if you want to stop and stare at something for a while you face into the current and kick, therefore staying in one place.
The Tortuga dive was actually the last certification dive, so at this point I was a certified diver. Woo hoo! We still had one more dive left on the boat, so we headed to Baracuda, where I kind of dropped the ball on some of the skills I was now certified to use.
At Baracuda, you aren’t looking down so much as moving alongside the reef looking laterally at the interesting creatures, then you kind of duck into little bays where there is no current and explore. My instructor had added a bit of weight for this dive, so now I sank like a rock when I wasn’t using proper bouyancy control. Which I wasn’t.
I think I was tired on this dive because I just really was not with it, it was going along alright, although I kind of kept bobbing up and down, then I started to get a little water in my mask(The instructor says that this is from smiling). My mom and our faithful leader were looking at a moray eel in the safety of one of the bays of the reef, so I took the time to get the water out of my mask. I pressed on the mask and blew through my nose, problem: more water in mask than before.
I remembered something about get vertical and look up, then blow through the nose while pressing on your mask. So I did this, pointed towards up I started to blow in my mask. Now my mask is completely full of water, I can’t see anything, I am starting to get a little bit nervous and I notice that I am moving vertically up. By the time I realized that I was moving vertically up I had gotten above the reef, therefore above the protection it offered from the current. I can’t see very well, all I can make out is the blurry figures of my mother and our teacher getting smaller and deeper. All kinds of things pass through my head at this point, many of them being thoughts of motorboats overhead that I can’t see.
I kind of try to calm down, I remember my friend Hans talking about problem-solving on his blog and remembered something he said about solving “one problem at a time.” So I decided that this would all be easier if I could see, so that would be my first task. I recalled that one of my friends that happened to be watching my confined water dives had commented that my method for clearing my mask would be correct if I were in a cave and upside down, so I considered turning upside down in the water to clear my mask but then decided that the easier thing to do would be to push on the top of the mask instead of the bottom. This worked, I could see!
Next problem, I was floating up and away from my group. Well, I could see that I had sort of floated above the reef anyway, so I had to get over and back and down…so deflated my vest and swam across the current until I was close to where they were.
As much of a problem as it seemed for me, they actually didn’t even notice I was gone, so it must really have all happened in a short period of time. We carried on with the rest of the dive and we made it back to the boat without incedent.
We will see where it goes, I am not so sure that its the activity for me. At least now when people ask my if I dive I can say yes.
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June 1st, 2008 by Solomon
So I mentioned the other day that I was going to a meditation conference on Tuesday night. I went, it was pretty good. I have been trying to add daily meditation in my life, so I was interested in what the Lama had to say.
The talk was held at Ytsasil(sp?) school on 26th and 25th, I went with some friends and we showed up at about 6:45pm and the conference was not scheduled to start until 7:30 so we decided to walk down to a coffee shop on La Quinta for a cup before the event started. We returned at 7:15 and there was a line to get in out the door, we finally got our seats at around 7:45 but the conference did not start until about 8:30. The room filled up, by the time it all started it was standing room only with people stacked up in the doorway and out in the hall listening to the speaker. I had no idea so many people in Playa Del Carmen would be interested in this sort of thing.
The speaker was Lama Ole Nydahl, one of the few Buddhist Lamas from the western world. He had a lot of good things to say, often joking and wandering off into interesting stories. The translation into spanish was phenomenal, the girl who translated didn’t miss a beat and really got the message correct. I actually had a hard time hearing the Lama’s microphone so I payed more attention to the translator.
The Lama talked for about an hour and then opened the room for questions. Many people had very well thought out questions, the questions section went on for at least another hour.
Before the questions ended we had to leave because we were late for another engagement, but we got information on group meditation sessions in Playa Del Carmen on a regular basis.
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