Friends, Photography, and Guns

Eggs over buttered toast. Yum.

I woke up around 7:30 AM. It was nice not having a schedule where I needed to be anywhere at anytime. My morning was slow and lazy. I decided to make toast with an egg “sunny-side-up” on top. I’m not sure where I got the idea for this from but I think it was from the movie V for Vendetta. It’s an English thing I think. I realized I don’t have a toaster. How do you toast bread without a toaster? Ah, I’ll use a frying pan.

Breakfast was very experimental. I melted butter on the pan and put a slice of bread on it and turned up the heat. The butter soaked into the bread while the outer part of the bread became crispy. The dish turned out surprisingly good. I love discovering simple and satisfying dishes to cook. For most of the morning I just stayed home to journal and relax. Slowly slowly.

By 1:30 PM I walked down the street to look for a motorbike driver to take me to Alona Beach. I wanted to see my friends there and pick up my motorbike I was renting from Rubi. I didn’t find any motorbike drivers on the road so I stopped by a small snack stand (sari-sari store) to ask where I can find a motorbike driver. The guy behind the counter offered to drive me for 100 pesos which I bargained down to 80 pesos. He closed and locked up his shop and drove me to Alona Beach. I later found out I should have only paid 50 pesos. Damn.

Good to be back on Alona Beach, my home beach.

My "sis", Ren.

It was great seeing familiar faces and places at Alona Beach. I first stopped at Coco Vida to visit anyone there. Ren and the security guard were there. I found Rubi and got the keys to her motorbike. Next I went to Genesis Divers where the usual kitchen staff was and Sander. Giso, the owner of Genesis, went out on an Open Water dive which I’ve never seen before. By 2:30 PM the boat crew and a few others came back from a dive. Several people congratulated me on becoming an instructor which was very nice; the people at Genesis are like family to me.

For lunch I treated myself to a big German geschnitzel lunch. It was good and hardy. For the rest of the afternoon, I just hung around Genesis talking to Sander and others. Sander assumed that I will be working at Genesis as an instructor even though I haven’t officially asked Luer or Giso since I became an instructor. Sitting around, I met Laura, an American guest staying at Genesis who is a professional photographer and just got her Open Water certification today. Being the photo geek I am, I almost immediately talked to her about photography.

Laura is into travel photography and photographing people of different cultures. I’ve always enjoyed travel photography but never was good at photographing people largely due to fear of being yelled at or insulted. I asked her about several things and basically found out that ones approach to shooting people is highly dependent on the subject and the context they’re in. If the person you’re shooting gives you a dirty look just move on.

Oops staff.

In the evening, Luer, Sander, Laura, and I had two rounds of beer at Genesis. For dinner, Sander, Laura, and two Danish girls staying at Genesis went with me to Oops bar. It was good to see the Oops girls again. Not much has changed there except there is a new girl named Marilen. During dinner, there was a slightly heated discussion with teh two Danish girls on the topic of legal guns in the US.

The Danish girls are psychology students so they tried to analyze why a person would want a gun in America. Fear of being harmed? Their thought was that America is a dangerous place where most people had a gun and carried it around with them because they feared being harmed. Interestingly, I’ve met other foreigners who had the same ideas of Americans. Being American myself, I know this isn’t true.

The girls didn’t see why America just ban guns and felt that it was stupid that nobody was doing anything to work towards this. Of course, it’s not that easy to do especially since the right to bear arms is in our constitution and the issue to bear arms has been debated for a long time. I’m not going to get into the debate right now because it would take too long. Its just really interesting how other people view America and its people. Non-Americans view America as being dangerous while I know a lot of Americans who view foreign countries as being dangerous. I have a feeling the media has a big influence on this thinking. I digress.

Sander of the Netherlands.

After Oops bar I went to Coco Vida to have a few drinks with Sander, the two Danish girls, and instructor Mike.


- jason