I spent about 3 hours at the bottom of a pool today practising technique and safety procedures for scuba diving. I am in a very small group with only two other guys who are pretty competent so we can get through it all really fast. Our instructor is this really cute and super enthusiastic french chick so that's awesome as well :-). Half the time I find myself just listening to her accent rather than what she's actually saying.

Diving is much more complicated than you might think - the risks of both decompression sickness and nitrogen narcosis are much more real than you might expect and you have to use a dive computer or dive tables to calculate how long you can stay under at certain depths without having to stop to decompress on the way up. Also due to the fact you're breathing compressed air, if you come up too fast while holding your breath your lungs can rupture so the number one rule when scuba diving is never to hold your breath. Breathing underwater is an awesome experience, I can't wait to try it out in the real ocean tomorrow.

There is a lot of stuff going on at the hostel this weekend. It seems like a really great place, the staff are always organising good events for the people that stay here and yesterday there was free goulash for everyone. Everyone who is staying here is really friendly. I can't drink much this weekend cos I don't want to dive hungover but I will go to the events anyway and have a chat with some new people.

Staying here has given me the travel bug so badly, I just wanna up and disappear into Asia for six months or something. All in good time, I will stay here for long enough to make some good money and maybe then it will be time to jet off somewhere really exotic.