Scuba Diving in Taormina
The whole gang wakes up early as the practical diving course starts at 9 AM! We take a taxi as the bus only appears like 5x a day like tf.
Arriving early in front of the diving shop, we descend to the closely located bay in front of the Isola Bella, one of the most important attractions of the city. Here, Thilo takes a bath under the jealous eyes from his companions. Full with jealousy the three of them went on to meet their new PADI daddies while Thilo stayed a bit further to chill at the beach. Their paths shall not cross again until the afternoon - until then, our blogs shall be seperated.
(Hildaelbert blog continues here, THILOS BLOG continues in another blog post)
Part Hildaelbert (Samira, Yael and Timo)
Thilo decided to take a morning-swim and the rest of us made our way to the diving store. After filling out the necessary documents in the lobby we changed location to the „jungle base“. The area where the briefings before each dive are held, where the equipment is located and last but not least, where people are drinking coffee, eating cookies and have fun. We got asked if we wanted a coffee multiple times a day and yael, our caffein addict, never said no. After she had her first shot (of espresso) that day, she was ready for our first open water dive.
Clement, one of our dive instructors, started our first briefing. He explained some basic things about boyency etc. and which exercises we were planing to do under water. First, we were a bit confused because he was always talking about “hair”, but then we realized that he was french and meant “air”, lol. Then, the time came to get ready. Nothing unusual happened, except that Yael and Samira were a bit surprized that they got size L for the wetsuit, but I guess after all the pizza, gnocchi and pasta they ate, they are living life as thicc booty girls now. #thiccbitches
After we had all our equipment selected, we had to go pee, so we made our way to the toilet and well, the toilet was quite funny. It was bearly holding together and the door, which by the way was not closeable, had big round holes in them. We somehow managed that during the time we where there, nobody came in while we were peeing, yay. After all of us released our bladder, we were ready for our first dive. We walked with our tanks on our backs (afterwards our backpacks felt soo light) to a little boat.
The dive was amazing. Taking breaths under water truly feels breathtaking #jokester. We even saw a few big orange seestars! One could see that we were noobies: Controlling our boyency was a bit hard. We were floating too much upwards or to the ground quite a few times (Luckily our instructors came to our rescue :) ). But thats okay. Nobody is born as a diving pro ;).
On our way back to the diving center, Yael had a little problem, which occured many times during our trip: Even though she‘d just gone to the toilet, she had to pee - really bad. So she sprinted to the beloved toilet as soon as the boat arrived. She made it in time, yay. We didn‘t do another dive that day but Timo didn‘t have enough of the sea, so we walked to the beach. He went for a swim and when he came back, Yael felt a little bit trashy. She had to lay down and sleep a lil. Even though Timo and Samira slowely but surely became hangry, they waited patiently. (Yael edit: Thanks guys <3)
At around 3 pm Yael was finally awake-ish and we headed to the cablecar to get to Taormina. We went straight to the first resaurant we saw, but sadly it wasn’t open anymore. It was in that moment that Thilo walked by and he told us where to find other places to eat. As he had already eaten, he went exploring Taormina a bit more while we ordered our food. Timo and Samira had some delicious tomato-aubergine pasta (after the two weeks in Italy they basically consist of tomatoes and aubergine) and Yael - what a surprise - gnocchi. After the first few bites, Yael was suddenly alive again.
When we almost finished our food, we met up with Thilo at the restaurant, he took an espresso shot with Yael, and she started to feel even more alive, so she suggested to walk up the hill for a nice view.
We walked uphill for quite a while. At a nice spot we all sat down and enjoyed the magnificant view over Taormina.
After some time we try our luck by reaching our AirBnB on foot which resulted in a 40 min descending hike. (Part of which contained passages on the bare street lol). Eventually we reached our apartment where we cooked the best Hummus dish ever, sided by some wine yummyuuum
[TODO Insert image with view over Taormina]
