diving, bangkok again and two days in the strangest place on earth

well again I'm writing from an airport with WIFI. I'm in Abu Dhabi (you shouldn't bother drinking coffee here) waiting to fly to Germany to see Anna Lisa, currently my favourite German.

I had a nice two weeks in Thailand, and although my feet are very, very angry at me for wearing flippers for so long, scuba diving was so, so much fun. I did PADI Open Water on an island called Koh Tao (where it seems a few other people have caught on that you can learn to scuba dive). Koh Tao is very pretty and one of those places where I'm not sure if there are actually any Thai people. Apparently a lot of the people who own businesses there, to make money off people like me, are actually Burmese. Prices were fairly inflated for Thailand and the water (as in from the pipes not the sea) smelled a bit like a mix between blood and rotten eggs. Mm. Despite this Koh Tao was a really nice place to chill out in between dives and I even found good coffee. There was also an Australian pub called 'Choppers' and explaining to my American friend who Chopper Reid is was fun..'he cut his ears off in prison and then wrote some books.' Highly factual.

I liked Open Water so much I did an advanced course afterwards which included a deep dive (to 30m, Open Water goes to 18), a wreck dive and a night dive. The Advanced was really fun (although I missed my group from Open Water) and the wreck was amazing! The wreck we saw had been recently sunk (a lot of wrecks are sunk on purpose..) and was an old thai war ship. Before going down to see it, I read the section in the book about wreck diving where it stated over and over again that one of the most important things about wreck diving is not to touch the wreck. When we got down there, my instructor was so excited by it (because it was the first time he had seen it too) he climbed onto the guns at the front and had a little pretend shoot before insisting I do the same. Afterwards he was like 'well there were no other dive schools around!'

After spending a nice day in Bangkok (avoid Kao San Road and everything improves!! Unless you're really into vomit on the side of the road) with some really interesting people I met at breakfast, I flew to Abu Dhabi to meet Beck and Geoff.

They are living in a town called Al Ain, about 1.5 hours from Abu Dhabi and a similar distance to Dubai. I might be the only person in the world who has visited Al Ain and not Abu Dhabi or Dubai, but it doesn't take much to see that this whole place is strange... The outside temperature is around 45 degrees (and it's Ramadan so no drinking water in public) 80% of the country are expats and everything that is green was basically brought in and would die in about two days if not for the water that is pumped around to keep everything alive. Beck and Geoff have been here for almost six weeks and have not yet found a house, so last night I stayed in the Hilton (where they have been living) which was very nice, slightly better than my rotten egg smelling room on Koh Tao.