It just means you dive for hours and potentially deeper without having nasty decompression stops for hours at a time.
It’s a bit more complicated than that in reality – but that’s the 101 lesson. If you want to know more - hey – I’ll teach you ;)
It was a cool course although harder than I imagined to master and a little bit scary to be honest when going through some of the disaster drills. Still a way to go before I can teach it - but not a bad start until the point when I got a bloody great cold half way through the week and had to stop diving. I pushed it a bit and now I’m deaf in one ear for the next two weeks whilst it sorts itself out. Not too clever.
I flew back a few days early in the end as I was getting bored silly of Malaysian TV (only 5 channels) and one of those is an all day repeating cycle of MacGyver, Remington Steele and Matt Houston. It’s the channel where shitty detective TV series never die. I’ll pop back later in the year after I get back from the UK/US in March once I need my fix of Murder She Wrote.
The entire week was a bit of a disaster as I broke my iphone by taking it diving, I broke my hearing through the cold – and whilst there I also had the third ID fraud in the last two years, this time on my iTunes account. Not a very good week really.
Since arriving in Sing I’d been missing doing the cultural activities that I used to do in London so at Christmas I booked myself some tickets for Carmen which was in town and playing at the Esplanade Theatre.
This was great, as I’d fancied seeing the Esplanade up close for some time. The building, like most grand theatres is quite a spectacular sight glistening away on the Singapore horizon. The building from the outside is quite remarkable and is not dissimilar to the shape of two halved Durian fruits. As long as it doesn’t pong like one thank you.
Durian for the uninitiated is a fruit of truly nauseating properties. You either love it or hate it. Some say you’ve only really got Asia in your blood once you’ve accepted the fruit. I’m not so sure about this. The great thing about Durian is all the various guises it comes in.
Durian chocolate, crisps, moon cakes, ice cream – you name it. If you can get it – you can be damn sure there is a Durian flavoured hybrid of it.
It’s hard to really describe the Durian smell in words which don’t make it sound totally foul. It divides opinion into equally as hostile encampments as Marmite can. Personally, I’m not a big fan of anything that smells like old socks full of smelly cheese that’s been festering in the boot of the car on a hot and humid day. But that’s just me.
Maybe it’ll grow on me in time.
Anyway, after grabbing the tickets and settling down in the surprisingly big seats I sat back and took in the show. The theatre was basically a carbon copy of a traditional Shaftsbury avenue theatre. The classic horse shoe design on a slight slope, with four tiers offering elevated seats all not too far away with pretty good views. I’d prompted for tenth row stall seats as I quite fancied a good view and was not disappointed.
I’d never seen Carmen before, although I did know the story and was aware it was a relative smorgasbord of classics and ditties that you pick up with relative ease. What was unusual was watching a majority Chinese cast sing a Spanish themed opera in French. It was all done pretty well and the screens at the side translating into Mandarin and English made it all the more easy. The English, not the Mandarin obviously.
For those that don’t know the story of Carmen – here is my slightly abridged version.
Girl working at Lemonade factory starts drinking far too much of the local produce and goes a bit loopy on it and has a bit of a rough and tumble at the office with one of the other girls over the merits of fruit based drinks counting as one of the required five-a-day. The ensuing altercation is split up by the local shop steward, Mr Jose – who subsequently decides that Carmen is the best thing since R. Whites was invented and promptly decides that she’s the one that he want to make juice with from now on.
Carmen tries to persuade Mr Jose into running off to the hills to start off their own Organic Lemonade business with the possibility of resurrecting Panda Cola. He finds this a bit hard to believe and decides that nobody would want to buy Panda Cola, particularly in the hills of Seville, so goes back to the factory shaking his head in disbelief.
Carmen being a slightly more fiery Spanish women clobbers Mr Jose over the head and drags him off to the hills where she dreams of making ice cream floats. Mr Jose starts coming around to the idea of this as a sound business idea just as Carmen bumps in to the local prized flower arranger Mr Hyacinth. She realises she can only have true happiness with a world champion flower arranger and decides that Panda Cola was truly an awful business proposition and that eighties based cola drinks was a ridiculous idea. Mr Jose is swiftly consigned to the back room and is no longer considered as a viable entity which peeves him somewhat.
Mr Jose having just invested everything into this takes this ever so slightly badly and decides that it’s in the best possible interest to kill everyone, which he goes about doing.
There’s a bit of singing and dancing involved in all of this and everyone seems to have a jolly good time about it, until of course when they all die.
That’s my slightly shorter version of the story but I think it captures the prevalent parts of the story and portrays the layered and complex messages of love, lemonade making and not to mess with Latino women. On the whole, it didn’t have the complete magic or energy that you’d get in a London theatre, but it was a great substitute and I’d love to go again sometime in the future.
I’ve finally figured out the local theatre circuit now, so should be planning a few more trips as the year progresses.
