Looking for things underwater

It’s surprising (or maybe it isn’t) just how quickly the beautiful and exotic can become mundane. Pretty soon, fish caught hours before you eat it is just the standard (Silvia: This fish was caught yesterday? Gross); if the water is less than absolutely clear for fifteen feet down, it’s not worth going in; and the scooter becomes more of a hassle than a pleasure (actually, that last one’s not true, I still really love driving the scooter).


But then this past Friday, we went snorkeling for the first time in a while. (Although once again, I didn’t actually have a snorkel, just flippers and goggles, so I guess it was really just goggling. Kind of like Googling, but underwater.) We swam for quite a while, and at around the midpoint we found ourselves on Crab Cay, the islet we had been to before about two months ago. There was nobody else there at all, so we had it all to ourselves for the afternoon, and took advantage by lying down on the dock in the late afternoon sun for half an hour and doing nothing in particular. Sitting there on the dock, with the entirety of Providencia y Santa Catalina spread out in front of us and the sun setting into the mountains, it struck me anew, being as isolated and far away from normalcy as I’ve ever been. And then we jumped back in the water, and startled a cloud of calamari into spraying their ink and darting away, and the feeling stayed. Coral reefs will do that to you.


So will meeting other people who are just as intent on savoring the experience, culinary and otherwise. The other day we made friends with a Swiss couple who was here on their honeymoon, and met up with them several times. The first time, they brought along a Spanish couple they had met, and after a not insignificant period of requisite awkwardness, we all ended up talking about Christmas traditions in different countries. (Turns out the Swiss Santa is considerably more violent than the U.S. version, and the Catalonian manger has at least one figurine you would never expect to be there. Hint: the Spanish name is el Cagon*.) The Spanish couple left the next day, and later in the week we went out for dinner again with the Swiss couple and one other Swiss woman they met at their hotel. To the extremely incongruous sound of Enya playing from the restaurant speakers, I ended up talking with the Swiss couple for a while about health care, but more generally about medicine (they’re both med students in their residencies, she’s an OB/GYN and he’s focused on public health). It was really interesting to hear them speak, both from the perspective of doctors who know a lot about medicine and members of a different system who have an outside view on the U.S. And though health care can’t really compete with miles of clear blue water, afterwards it did seem just a little bit new.

*it means "the shitter." It's apparently pretty much exactly what it sounds like.