Scuba

So I've been really bad about updating recently...mostly because nothing much has been going on. Since my last post I've wrapped up my classes, spent 2 weeks scuba diving with my parents, graded all of my finals, packed up my apartment, and made it down to my friends house in Pattani.

So the most exciting activity was by far the scuba diving! My parents came out to Phuket on Feb. 18th and stayed until midnight on March 1st. We spent one day on a god awful hotel club presentation, because dad might have been able to win an ipad or $1000 but we all knew he was going to win the free week at their hotels. The best part of that excursion was when the guy flipped out at the end because he hadn't convinced dad to buy into the overpriced club...which he knew wasn't going to happen as soon as we started the tour. After wasting a day on the fantastically fun hotel tour, we spent the next couple days at the pool, shopping, and eating delicious fresh fish every night for dinner (YUM!!!!).

Then we started our Similans live-a-board/diving extravaganza! We did 14 dives in 4 days (3 days of 4 dives and 1 day of 2). We woke up at about 6:30 every day and finished diving around 6pm each day. We saw lots of cool fish and sea life (whales, dolphins, octopi and sharks).

Here are some of the fish we saw (besides all the lion-fish and clown-fish):Juvenile Harlequin sweet-lips (they look like they're dancing when they swim)

The adorably ugly frogfish!

My favorite the juvenile Emperor Angelfish

Mantis Shrimp

Pineapple fish

Yellow Boxfish

and the feather stars
(one of these guys tried to hitch a ride on dad's wet suit)

After the live-a-board we went over to Koh Phi Phi for EVEN MORE diving!!!!! We did another 3 days of diving, which put us as 21 dives for me and 20 for mom and dad (they didn't do the last dive because they had to fly home at 1am). While we were on Koh Phi Phi we had to hike up 200 stairs every night to reach our hotel room and one day monkeys broke into our room (we left the window open for 5 minutes to cool the room down). The monkeys stole a bag of peanuts and a couple other snacks but I chased him out of the room before he could get anything else!

I had a blast diving with my parents :D

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