April in a Nutshell

I’m not sure how many people read this, but for those that do, I am sorry I have been MIA for a while. A lot has happened since my last post and now, which I needed to focus on more than writing/updating my blog. Time has been flying here and I am almost done with my fourth class of the semester. I have only three weeks left before I return to the states and it’s a sad yet exciting moment to realize I am so close to going home.

Well since my last post back in March a few things have happened to me, both good and bad, that occupied majority of my time and energy. First, I got my advanced SCUBA certification here at San Cristobal with a few of my friends. The class was three days long and was a combination of classroom and dive time. We had a total of five dives; Search/Recovery, Navigation, Deep Water, Wreck and Night. All of them were awesome in their own ways but the night dive was easily my favorite out of all of them. While ascending in the night dive, we shut off out flashlights and waved our arms around in the water to see the bioluminescent plankton. The water literally lit up like the night sky and is something I for sure will not forget. The advanced class is one of the really positive things that happened to me, so here come the two negatives of the week.

The first negative is a few weeks ago I woke up to my bank account being drained because someone got a hold of my debit card number. The hard part was I couldn’t get in touch with my bank myself so my mom and I constantly had to call each other back and forth so she could talk to the bank for me. My card was ultimately shut down leaving me with a debit card that was completely useless and in a foreign country with no money. After figuring out all the banks of my friends here in the Galapagos and family members back home, Friday my Grandpa was finally able to wire some money to my friend for me. It’s been a really stressful couple of weeks but that situation was thankfully handled.

My second negative event happened the same day as my bank account being stolen. That morning at school I found out my host family was leaving the islands, for some reason I don’t know, causing me to have to move out of my original host house into another one half way through my time in the Galapagos. Another stressful event.. Although IES and the university were really helpful in placing me into a new home, it was still the fact I had to relocate and get comfortable in a whole new family for another 6 weeks. Thankfully I was placed into a home with one of my close friends, which made the transition a lot easier on me. So there was a happy ending to another stressful situation. Its week three in April, I feel bad because I haven’t blogged once but everything I had to go through is settled ad I can now enjoy my last few weeks here on the islands stress free and actually put all my time and energy into my last class and having fun.