OK, on the 17th I had sharks before breakfast, sharks before lunch and it was very close to become dinner for sharks on the 3rd dive. This was definitely my best and most intense diving experience I ever had!
@Seven Seas Team: thank you so much for this great trip!
Credits for Video Material: Frank, Michael & Sven for actually most of the material in the clip (I had just my GoPro backup with me)
Credits for Music: Sandrine Piau – Cum Dederit
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFp6nKjhFy0
Wir kennen alle den Tiefenrausch. Wir sind auch alle – also ich zumindest (bisher) – der Meinung, dass er da ist und wir das gut unter Kontrolle haben, oder? Ich liebe Kennzahlen und das Messen, Zählen, Wiegen im allgemeinen, also habe ich gerne die Gelegenheit ergriffen in einer kontrollierten Umgebung auf 50m abzutauchen.
Ice diving is cool! Well it is really cool at the end! After carrying all your stuff to the lake, trying hard not to slide to death on your way down (do not forget to have some spikes on your dry-suit shoes!), enjoying the effect of sun on your black dry-suit, sweating your dry-suit wet and then freezing your face off in the water it is cool – finally!
…what a great start and what a great end!
Not at all as I’ve planed and again a prove of concept you can not plan because life happens.
So trying to digest my learnings lets start here:
Yes you can beat Starbucks! It was probably my first encounter with the american way of sucking and at the very beginning it was usually an extremely intimidating experience to get your name pinned to the inability of not being able to order a coffee. Get the iPhone app, ask for a not-so-offen mix, watch and enjoy how the poor guys have to check up what a Ristretto shot is… Kurt 1:Starbucks 0
…continuing with ‘wins’. I had quite some professional wins. Pyrrhus would have been proud of most of those achievements especially when looking back. Kurt some: Company 0
However the professional bottom-line is that those artifacts are in place and help the company to do it’s “business”.
Kurt 1: Company +++
I wasted the summer in a death march project.
Kurt 0: Company 0
I learned about the pillars of the american way of life:
…so yeah, still summer: one of the first actions of the new locust infection in the company was to throw away the ‘One company one vision’ posters. One of the few “communication acts”…
…on a lower level an ostrich blurbs stuff like ‘we have to put a man on the moon’. Oh man… start practicing with putting a cheeseburger on a table…
Kurt: watching Company: let’s see
—
However, to stop this negative mood: 2010 is the year I (really) came together with Aivis!
…have to add some stuff on ‘hubris’ (but right now I prefer to wait for my plane to the old world – and home!)
…OK, a good Friend once told me you can kill a frog in a pot just by slowly raising the heat. When you throw the frog in hot water it will take some heat but jump out and survive.
Since I’m back from Colombia I know I am in such an environment and today I had the great opportunity to see my future here. It is damn close to 1989! Done that, been there, thanx for the fish and bye bye Gotham…
…looking for a way to get out of this blob fish tank before the main part of the s* around hits the fan!
The center of the universe is gorgeous, intense, full of energy, every corner radiates something different, fast, unforgiving, cruel. How to not instantly fall in love with it.
What a difference to Altkönigstraße 🙂
Most people move at a speed near running. People strolling are definitely tourists. People looking around to. Real New Yorkers browse a mobile in one hand and are holding a Coffee can in the other, move fast and manage not to crash into a car, building or other pedestrians. They carry at least a small bottle of water with them in the permanent fear of instant dehydration. Have to practice this.
Right now this is probably the most annoying and embarrassing for me. I am to dumb to configure a coffee! Tall is small, Small is Short but you have to say Short to get a really small one, Grande – G R A N D E is just medium?! Venti, a name every person on the planet associates with a size is large. It may translate to the Italian twenty, but the great translator who came up with this forgot that Italy, as the rest of the world, is using the metric system and therefore it does not translate to 20Oz (that are for some flavors / blends 24Oz). NASA paid a lot of money to learn this lesson the hard way. Not talking about the different flavors and blends. I am staying at the counter, feel plain stupid and then I have to tell my name to eternally link it to my incapability to order a cup of coffee and let everybody else enjoy my embarrassment. Tough lessons…
My next observation, now not in any particular order:
I have no other explanation as many girls run around in knee high tights and wear shoes with nearly nonexistent soles barely covering parts of their toes. Men are jogging of course in short trousers. The temperature at which I have seen this is 4 degrees celsius (40F). This scares the hell out of me as it can only mean it will get much much colder.
This is not true for dogs here. A lot are wearing rather thick coats!
I spent money to buy Spam! 🙂 Yes, for the first time I bought Spam. Now it’s waiting in my kitchen to be consumed and I can’t wait to learn how Spam tastes!
Y E S !!! I was thinking about something like East Village, NoHo and Greenwich Village. Urban, international, open minded and I ended up with an apartment on the Bleecker Street. I was not aware that it is the center of exactly what I was looking for. One year will not be enough to explore this area that is hard to describe. Everything you need is just few steps away between one of the countless bars, restaurants and night clubs. There is even a real supermarket just one block away. It sells real food!
Everybody who knows me knows: I do not hear R&B. Well, I can’t explain, but since the last two visits here I started to love it. Must be a virus or so. I can’t figure a better song to hear right now as Empire State of Mind.
After I returned from South America I was afraid to loose the little I learned and soon it became obvious that I was right. Am am so happy, to realize that this is the unofficial street language. Plenty of opportunities to practice.
Stay tuned for more…
Referenced Flickr photos: Greenwich Village, various NYC street scenes
(first after thoughts from home looking back)
…home? A rather strange feeling after such a long time. Please consider, that this is the last picture I have in mind:
The only things you can do there is sunbathing, diving, drinking Cuba Libre and smoking thick Cohibas…
I spent more then the last month mostly with diving – seriously addicted – and was not in the mood or simply not able to post anything new. Even though you will find an internet cafe in tha last adobe village on the Bolivian altiplano, in Cuba this is something very special available only in the top notch hotels. However, I was also not in the mood, as I preferred to sunbath, dive, drink Cuba Libre and smoke thick Cohibas.
(side note: on writing this a hailstorm is just unloading its cargo over my house…)
Leaving Taganga was technically really not easy. Without El Trolls great off-road capabilities it would have been impossible, as all roads where deeply excavated. I needed help from that small excavator to pave me a ramp!
Some impressions from Cartagena, the last stop for brave El Troll.
When you leave Columbia, be prepared for some serious searches by their anti narcotics troups. However, this is nothing compared to the search I got when entering Cuba. “You are the passanger from Columbia? Please follow us…”. Just two hours later I was allready allowed to enter. Oh, durring that search they confiscated my GPS and my sat-phone, as those were potential threats to state security.
Havana is a place for itself. Folded in the Fidelian stasis field it is so totally different from any other place I have seen so far.
The last stop for me was the Maria la Gorde, or more simple: Paradise!
all good things come to an end, but stay tuned for more after posts…
Kydroon 