We have a cockroach...

The highlight of this week, I’m sure was the way I was woken up on Thursday morning. I felt something touching my arm and I thought someone was trying to wake me up. I turned a little bit to see who it was, only to see huge cockroach scamper off my arm and underneath my pillow! This thing was huge, like bigger than a golf ball!!! We have definitely heard horror stories about the cockroaches that live in our apartments, but my apartment hadn’t seen one yet! I jumped out of my bed, checked to see that it was only 5:00am and then made my plan of action. My roommate Alison was already awake because she was calling home, so when she saw me jump she came into my room to help me search. In the process we woke up my bedmate Emma (who sleeps in a separate bed about 6 inches away from mine.) We found it hiding between the boxspring and mattress, but when I went to actually kill it, it got away. We spend a long time searching for it in my things and underneath the bed, but never found it. If I think too much about it, I get grossed out sleeping in my bed. But hopefully it won’t come back again!!

Scuba this weekend was very cool. Although you cannot imagine how hard it is to get into a wet suit. One girl described it as trying to put on a nylon compression sock on your whole body. It is just so tight and so thick and then your legs seem so big that they’ll never fit! It requires teamwork to put them on and off. The rest of the gear is very heavy and hard to walk in. We have a weight belt, the oxygen tank and all the other stuff. It just makes me really unbalanced, so I’m sure I look like the biggest doofus trying to walk around. And then I have to put the flippers on!! We did a shore-entry dive, where we basically just walked into the water and swam out. Swimming with all that gear on against the incoming waves was kind of hard. Diving is super fun, after you get past the gut instinct that you need to go up for air. Because once you’re down on the bottom, it is hard to just go back up fast. You might get sick from the change in pressure if you move up or down too fast. We were diving about 15 meters deep. We saw the leg of an octopus coming out from the rocks, a huge lobster with long antennas, sea anemones and tons of fish. We just swam around a lot and then did some skills on the bottom of the ocean. When we tried to stay still at the bottom, the waves rocked us back and forth so much that we had to all link together so that no one would float away on their own. If you get sea sick, you wouldn’t have liked sitting on the bottom!!

I’m going diving again today, as long as the weather cooperates. Not too much progress on that paper, I’ll need to whip that out tonight and tomorrow. Then we only have class on Monday this week and it’s spring break! I cannot even tell you all how fast this trip is flying by. And I know that after spring break, everything will go even faster. Just because we have trips planned for every weekend and there are a lot more papers and such to keep us busy going from one week to the next. I love it! But it is hard to take it all in, I hope I’m not taking anything here for granted. We just keep reminding ourselves, we’re in Africa!