THURSDAY, MARCH 30 --

Wow, it's been almost a month now since the trip, thus the engagement. I'm feeling pretty comfortably engaged now, and not stressing about wedding planning, as I was beginning to in week two. I think the stress came from the realization of all of the decisions I/we would have to make. Setting the date at vaguely a year from now has given us a comfort zone, and I have allowed myself to relax and decide things as they come, and not set arbitrary deadlines just yet. I bought a book called "The Conscious Bride," which is written by a therapist, and discusses the emotions and upheaval that most women go through when they are planning a wedding. It turns out that the "bridezilla" phenomenon is not just about the event planning, it stems from a deeper psychological place -- the expectations of family and society that everything has to be perfect, when what is really going on is a kind of death of your single self and birth of your new, married self. So the psychological transition that is going on is pretty big, and at the same time you are the one responsible for making the ceremony and party perfect, instead of your community doing it for your benefit. Really, it's kind of a messed up way of going about it, now isn't it? Well, I believe that this event will be a collaboration between James and myself, and I am not exactly the typical bride, expecting to be "a princess" on "my day." It'll be fun, it'll be stressful, it'll be memorable. That's all I can ask.

OK, anyway, on to Thursday of Belize. After a leisurely breakfast, James and I walked around the island looking for a better place to stay. The uncomfortable bed was really getting to us, and we had both slept badly the night before. We wandered around a bit, stopping in at the lazy iguana b&b, which was pretty nice, and had a room for Friday night. It was a bit out of the way, so we told the owner that we would keep looking and give her a call if we wanted to take it. We looked at a couple of other places south of the main pier, but they were all full. As we were looking, we saw a family we had seen in San Ignacio (at breakfast at Hannah's) -- a white couple with an Asian baby. They were biking around looking for a place to stay as well. Finally, we decided to try the Seaside Cabanas, although we thought there was no way that there would be a room there, as it was the nicest place on the island, and the only place with a pool. Our luck was good, though -- they had had a cancellation for Friday night. So we took it. It was around $115 for a cabana, which seemed like a good deal.

Oh, also as we were walking around the island, we stopped in at a dive shop and asked about an intro scuba / resort course for James. They were nice, signed him up and told him to come back around 1 pm. So that was that.

We had a couple hours to kill, now that the hotel and scuba had been sorted, so we decided to hammock. The hammock on our deck was big enough for two, so we brought out a pillow and got comfy. We listened to my iPod together with the headphone splitter James had brought, and just enjoyed the hammock, the breeze, the view... Very nice.

Lunch....?

So, on to the scuba. I had decided that I wanted to go with, I could do the second dive with James, since his course was basically one test dive, where he'd go over the skills and get used to everything, then one fun dive. While he was doing the first dive I could snorkel, and I'd be there to take pictures and stuff. So the two of us got equipped and ready to go. Our scuba guy was really nice, had a creole-Belizean accent so was a little hard to understand at times. I can't remember his name... Oh well. James' course cost $90 and my dive (with equiptment) was $40. Not bad, eh?

We loaded all of our stuff into a long motor boat -- pretty big for what it was, just an open boat. We headed East and a little South, to the reef. Instructor guy (I'll call him ig) had James throw the anchor out, then moved to the front half of the boat to go over what they'd be doing in the water. I sat in the back and took a couple of pix. When James was ready to go, ig had him jump in (actually fall in backwards), then swim a couple of laps around the boat, getting used to breathing through the scuba regulator. I thought that was a good was to go -- when I first tried scuba in Tahiti, they just had us go straight under, straight down, even though we were just kneeling in shallow water. That freaked me out, and I had to quit, and try again the next day. The next day I conquered my fear, but it was still pretty freaky. Getting used to breathing while swimming around like you're snorkeling makes a lot of sense. Then ig jumped in, and they were off. I put on my wetsuit and did the backwards fall into the water as well -- it was good that I got to practice that without all the scuba gear, as I was a little nervous about getting in that way. Most of my previous dives had been off big boats, where we did the "giant step" method off the back.

Snorkelling was nice, if a bit boring. I got back to the boat before they guys came up, and I couldn't get back in at first. Finally I was able to pop up out of the water enough to get my leg over and pull myself in. When James came up, I asked him how it was -- and he was excited. It had gone well, he had done all the skills and his ears had been fine, though they had only gone down about 15 or 20 feet. After they got in the boat, we motored over to another area and dropped anchor again. I put my gear together, and ig changed tanks on their gear. And then we were off.

It was really cool diving with James. Ig was very mellow and didn't really seem to be leading us, so we just started going wherever we felt like. We were about 30 feet down, there was lots of coral and stuff to look at. We saw a couple of conch and a sea sponge, and generally just tooled around. About halfway into the dive, ig started leading us more, which was good -- we were totally turned around. When we finally came up, James and I had no idea where the boat was, the waves were big enough that you could only see it about 1/3 of the time.

So, after that adventure, I didn't really feel like I needed to do another day of diving on our last full day on the island. We decided we would be mellow instead. I think we went back to the suite and took a nap... I can't remember where we had dinner that night. Hmm, details... starting... to fade....

I do remember that we went back to the I&I that night. Our Canadian boys were there, along with Mike from Ohio. We had a good time, but decided to call it a night around midnight. James was feeling a little anxious about leaving the girls, but figured they could handle themselves at this point, I believe. Oh, wait -- James walked me home, then went out again to chaperone. I think they ended up at the sand-floored bar with a bunch of sketchy characters, so James didn't stay that long in the end, but I was asleep when he came in.