25 - Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

January 3, 2012

I am sending everyone warm wishes for the New Year! I hope everyone’s Christmas and New Year’s Eve were fantastic. Sorry for the lack of updates but not much out of the ordinary has been happening lately! I will try my best to keep this blog up to date as often as possible!

Last Sunday we celebrated Christmas with some of the GVI Divemaster Interns. We had cooked quite a big meal, including stuffed chickens, curry chicken, mashed potatoes, roasted vegetables, gravy, roasted potatoes and a big brownie for dessert. The meat was supposed to be cooked on the braii but it poured rain the whole afternoon so we made everything our not-so-great oven, so we ended up cooking the chicken for a couple hours. 

On Christmas day, Nicole had bought red Santa hats for the three of us and put little goodies in there. How amazing? And she knows me so well; she had bought me a bottle of coke and a chocolate bar. The whole day was spent lazing around the house since it rained most of the time. We watched Love Actually in our pajamas on a huge mattress in the living-room, and Yoda managed to fall asleep inside one of the Santa hats. We had also bought cardboard Christmas hats for our guest in the evening, and Ben took on the project to create a hat for Yoda. It only last 30minutes before she attacked it.

For the last 3 days before New Year’s Eve, we had been extremely busy at the shop because the French Marines were in town. They are usually based in La Reunion but were in Seychelles for holidays, and some of them took the time to do some diving. It also meant for us a boat full to capacity of only men, and craziness in the shop throughout the day. It was really fun though and met some great guys. I have to admit they were probably our messiest clients so far. After one dive, they all started jumping off the boat and pushing us Divemasters off as well. It was fun to relax though and let it all go. And they sure enjoyed being in the company of girls for a change – there are approximately 110 men for 9 girls on their ship.

As you can guess, I spent my New Year’s Eve with them and my friends at Tequila Boom. And since I was the only one speaking French, I was surrounded the whole evening by most of them. I’m not going to lie, I quite loved the attention! They all bought me drinks and one guy who came from Béziers, a town 30min away from where I live, even paid for me to get in the club. Not complaining! They all went crazy at midnight and we danced all night long. 

On January 1^st was also my roommate Emily’s birthday, and I had made brownies for her before we all went out to celebrate New Year’s Eve. It was overall a great evening with all my GVI and local friends, as well as some crazy French Marines! 

Bring it on 2012, you have big shoes to fill in !!