Marc's Public Blog - Trips to other locations

The day started with the last two dives for our PADI training: one in the morning and one in the afternoon. They were not particularly eventful, except for the congratulation handshake I got at the end (underwater) for having passed all the practical tests. Now, we still need to finish up all the theory tests and the end exam, which interestingly enough we're just taking at home (i.e. on the beach when we feel like it :). In other words, they're not being overly harsh on testing protocol :)

In other news, after having smashed my camera LCD yesterday, my camera got even worse today by refusing to completely open the lens, and thereby not taking any pictures. That's only to lose my underwater camera a few hours later (although I have good hopes that the dive center will find it somewhere and give it back to me today -> update: I did)
At the end of the day, I took my trusty glasses screwdriver set, opened up my digital camera, and managed to at least fix the lens jam, just in time to go to Amnesia for the legendary weekly Cream Party.
Seb, Alain and I went to bed around 21:00, woke up a bit past midnight and arrived at Amnesia a bit past 01:00, just before DJ Tiësto started his awesome set for the following 3 hours. After him, Paul Van Dyk did his 3 hour set, which aside from the fact that it was way too loud, was very nice too (for those who don't know them Tiësto and PVD are two of the biggest Techno DJs in the world. Only in Ibiza can you find nights like this).





The place was fairly packed (the main stage is not that big), so you had to fight to keep the space around you (especially as I was on some raised space to take better pictures). It's kind of annoying when people look like they're trying to pass by, and then just park right next to you, impeding on your ability to dance (and by that I mean move your arms, not your feet :) but some girl somehow took offense to the fact that I didn't move away to give her more space when she parked next to me (not that there was anywhere for me to go mind you), so she started dancing against me savagely and trying to push me with her butt (she was very close to the edge, with a big step down). Usually, I might not mind :) but in this case I did (I was with my friends and had no interest in moving away to give her my spot), so I made a point of keeping a firm stance while she was trying to move me and it took a lot of self discipline to avoid giving her a little hip push off the raised spot. Eventually she realized that I did still weigh a little more than her and that she'd be better off trying to dislodge someone else...


I felt very thankful to have brought and worn a good set of ear plugs. Alain's ears are pretty screwed up and he's going to skip diving as a result. Yes, don't point out to me the silliness of having to wear ear plugs at a music event, I know...
Anyway, we headed home past 07:00 and I managed to get 3-4H of sleep (it's kind of hot and noisy past 09-10:00).

As far as pictures are concerned, I was shooting blind the whole night (yes, one could make silly jokes about this statement, but no need :), since I had no visual feedback from the camera anymore (it also made it interesting to mess with settings by memory without seeing the menus), but out of 160 pictures, I still managed to get about a third that I could keep. I also took a few vids, but most of those just have inaudible oversaturated sound (which I knew was going to happen :) You can give this video a try though, and generally browse the
Pictures from Thursday