Diving UK

The last two weekends have been very busy with diving stuff. Well, that means they have been busy ones for Dave and kind of boring ones for me, especially the first when Dave had to go to the class room training and pool session for the Open Water Diving class. For me it meant I was able to work a little bit around the house, play with Amber and.... read Harry Potter. Yes, I bought the book. I didn't want to, because I didn't want to be part of the whole Harry Potter hysteria. But then I saw the book as a special offer at Tesco and I couldn't resist. I haven't finished it yet, so no need to ask me any question. I still have 1/3 to go.

But Harry was not the reason for this post. I wanted to share some diving experiences from the UK with you. Last weekend Dave had to do his 4 open water dives for his certificate and I decided to bring my equipment to England and go diving myself. The dive store where Dave booked the class said it is no problem, I certainly will find someone to buddy up with and so I travelled to England with all my stuff.

You may have heard about the flooding there. Well, we were lucky and didn't have that much rain, even if it was more than normal. But still we both were not very excited about the thought of going diving in the pouring rain. Not that getting wet is the problem, but sitting outside between dives, getting cold and having no dry place to change clothes is the bad thing. But we were lucky and it was mostly sunny on both days last weekend. The lake we went to is a little bit more than a one hour drive away and we enjoyed the drive very much (except of the drive home on Saturday, but that's a different story). Dave did his mandatory dives and on both days I found somebody to dive with me. So what did I learn during these days: First of all, almost every male diver in England has at least one tattoo. Second, they have changing rooms and don't change on the parking lot like we do at most places in Germany or the Netherlands. And third: the main attraction at the bottom of the lake is trash. Well, kind of. To make diving at that lake more attractive they placed a Doppeldecker bus, an airplane and a truck (or lorrie in British English) at the ground. All connected by ropes so nobody could get lost. And the ropes were very helpful since the visibility was so low (3m) and it was crowded under water.

We had a lot of fun and everybody passed the course. Did I mention that the name of the dive store is Scubadoo Divers? Therefore we bought a Scubidoo cake for the last day as a kind of celebrating the new divers.

I mentioned the drive home on Saturday. Well, the traffic on this whole weekend was terrible. First of all we ended up in a traffic jam on Friday night on our way from the airport. It took us more than an hour for one mile. It was late and we had to get up very early on Saturday morning so you can imagine that non of us were very happy with this situation on Friday. On Saturday we just wanted to stop by the base to get gas and something to eat before going home and walk Amber. It was a very quick stop, but then on our way from Lakenheath to Thetford we came to a stop on the A11. It seems that the road was closed, maybe an accident. After sitting there for a while we decided to turn around and use a different, much longer way to go home. That was no fun. Especially for the waiting dog at home. But otherwise the whole weekend was very nice. And now we can plan on going to some more diving trips together...

Blubb, blubb,

Anke

A weekend with Nico

We planned it for quite a while. Nico, my nephew and god-son asked me over and over again when he can spend a weekend with me. He used to do this more often before I was a frequent traveller. When he asked last February or so I offered him to come with me to England for a weekend. And now, finally, we did it. Since it is the time of school holidays it was a little bit easier for him arriving home late at night on Sunday. That was the main reason why we waited so long. I had no idea what this 10 years old boy expected. All I knew was that he is always to shy to even say hello to Dave in English when we visit them. So I was very curious to see what happened now that he couldn't avoid it. But it was fine. My brother brought him to the airport and after check in we went to a 10 years old favorite place for dinner: McDonald's. I also decided to buy him a new book to make sure he will not be bored.
The most amazing thing was his wish to speak English. Great! He already tried a conversation with Dave on our drive home from the airport. Nico also had a lot of fun with Amber (I hope this is also true for the dog) and geocaching. Yes, we introduced him to this GPS based treasure hunt. And even with not being very successful with the first cache (we walked around for almost 3 hours before we finally gave up on this) he wanted to do more of this.
We also went to the Air Force base, but the only planes we saw on a Saturday were the exhibition ones.
After some more geocaching on Sunday and lunch at Burger King we went to an old Anglo Saxon village. It is kind of an open air museum with an exhibition of Saxon, roman and viking stuff they found in this area. And Nico was interested in this as well. I translated the descriptions for him and he asked questions and wanted to see more. It was amazing, we had a lot of fun and when we came home he asked me to schedule the next visit. We will see, the next school holidays are around October....

One more thing I want to share with you. Monday was a very interesting day at work. No, not because of interesting work, but because of a big fire on the other side of the road. My office is in a building next to an recycling company which stored a huge amount of all kinds of recycling garbage on their property. They had a 40 x 90 meters storage room with plastic stuff and on Monday morning this started to burn down. Now, on Wednesday, the firefighters are still busy and you are still able to see some smoke, even if it is white now and not black as on Monday. Here are two pictures taken with my cell phone. One on Monday morning, the other on yesterday afternoon:

"Ape Saturday"

For those who wonder how the latest terrorist activities in London and Glasgow influences us: I expected it worse. The weekend when all this happened (the car bombs found in London and the Jeep crashing into Glasgow airport terminal) was the time I returned from Canada. Of course I heard about everything on the radio, but since we didn't go to London it didn't affect us. The only thing: I wanted to go to the airport earlier than usual. This is what they recommended on the radio. From outside Stansted airport the difference was that the road in front of the terminal was closed by police and only shuttle buses were allowed to use it. Inside the line at the security check was very long so we decided to skip the Sunday dinner and say good bye immediately. But it was worse than it seemed. It took me 50 minutes (which is more than usual, but less than expected) and they didn't do any further checks than normal. And actually, this was the only flight within the last 9 months that left in time.

Let me also complain a little bit about summer here in Germany. Really, up to now you can't call it summer. It is much too cold, at some days the temperature was only 55F, which is not nice for Germany. And it is grey. Like November, except of the leaves on the trees. Sigh. But last weekend we got a break from this. If you don't count the one shower on Saturday it didn't rain at all and Sunday was actually pretty nice with temperatures around 75F and sun. Dave visited me in Germany and we spent the weekend with Juergen and Ingrid from Cologne. They came visiting and Juergen wanted to visit a kind of "ape town". Do you have any idea what this is? It is a tree climbing area for adults and they are very popular in Germany though I have never tried it before. We paid 22Euros per person and got the equipment like ropes, gloves and all this climbing stuff. Then we had to wait for an instructor for explaining how all this stuff works. After the theoretical part everyone had to climb a small test round while the instructor was watching and deciding whether we were ready for the real adventure. And this adventure waited for us in the trees, 8m (26 feet) above the ground. We started by climbing up a steel rope-ladder to platform. From there the trees were connected by different kinds of "bridges". For example one was just a steel rope, another one was a log etc. I never had problems with heights before, but when I stopped and looked down for too long it really felt funny in my knees. The bad thing was the only rain shower (I talked about it before) of the whole weekend. Of course it took place when we were in the middle of the round. The scariest thing was the thunder I heard far away. Well, I didn't want to sit on a tree with a lot of steel ropes around when a thunderstorm is going on. But good luck there was no lightning and the rain lasted for only 10 minutes. Enough to make the ropes slippery and us wet, but not enough to make us end this adventure early. We had fun. And since we only had time to climb one out of 5 rounds I am pretty sure we will come back.
In the evening we had a nice dinner at a local micro brewery. Juergen and Ingrid invited us as they promised on my birthday back in April. We had a lot of fun. And we started to discuss some first plans for the wedding next year..... It seems so far away, but time goes by so quickly. We are pretty sure about the church part. Most probably it will take place on June 14th next year (when it is nice for every visitor from the US to travel Europe and summer school holidays for Dave's nephew). But we have no clue about the legal part. In Germany this is completely separated and we can't do the churgh thing without a legal wedding prior to that. We have some ideas, but nothing really planned. I will keep you updated ;o)