brief respite

Guess who was warm for a whole week?



These fools!

We stayed close to here



which, you know, just had views like this for no reason



We went to Nassau a couple of times. I got something shiny there for my birthday but I had to promise that I would give it back before my birthday so I could be surprised. Also, I promised that I wouldn't put pictures of it all over the internet because that would ruin the surprise. We looked for some elusive pirate museum and never found it because I refused to consult the guide book in the middle of a busy street. Jeff looked at me sideways and asked me if I was trying to blend in. I hadn't really thought about it but I guess my translucent Boston winter skin was a dead giveaway. Also, I wore SPF 50 sunblock like the whole time. This was my strategy so that I a) avoid skin cancer but mostly b) don't look like a person who goes to the Bahamas instead of beating the bushes looking for a job. I had to give a seminar to a bunch of scientists 2 days after I got back. Here's a hint - never do that. The seminar was fine but preparing for it was torture. Anyway...

I went snorkeling and scuba diving for the first time ever. Snorkeling was pretty cool - you put your face in the water and hang out with fish.



Scuba diving is scarier. They keep telling you things like "don't hold your breath because the air may expand in your lungs if you change depth" and "if your mask starts filling with water, cus you're under the ocean and it is so much bigger than you, tilt your face up and snort out" and "make sure you pop your ears because if you don't then your sinuses will explode and your eardrums will burst." And you take up maybe 0.06 square meters and the ocean is maybe 1.3 billion square km, it's pretty easy to feel expendable. So it took me a minute to join the rest of the group on the dive. I hung out by the surface for a while until I felt comfortable convinced myself that people do this all the time and they don't die. This is what I saw.





So, yeah, worth it. When we got back to the hotel room that night we ended up watching some show called Fatal Honeymoons where every story is about a young couple who died in the Bahamas or died during scuba diving or both. Oddly, my mantra of people-do-this-all-the-time still works on me. I'm nothing if not persistent dense.

Oh man, I almost forgot the best ending possible to the dive.



Nicholas Cage lives somewhere in Nassau so it's not totally random that there's a picture of him in the dive shop. My Chinese colleague told me that Asians love Nicholas Cage, which I find funny because I think Americans find him borderline ridiculous (Jeff's coworkers made a money voucher with Nicholas Cage's face on it to remember who was the last person to buy pizza). Anyway, as we were leaving, I heard the only Asian woman on our dive boat exclaim "aaah, Nichoras Cage!!" along with a camera shutter snap. Perfect ending to a day where my spouse and I did not die.