Julia Rose's Excellent Adventure!: Koh Tao

Christian and I had a great time in Bangkok, and our cooking class was a success! We started by going to the market to pick our food, and then our group started cookin up a storm at the little school in the city centre. The food was fantastic! (if I do say so myself) and we're looking forward to making more in England!
I'm now in Koh Tao and having a great time. I started my PADI scooba diving course half an hour after getting here and have fallen in love with it! I've met some interesting people on my course, and its been great fun spending time with them. I've also spent lots of time with Finbow which has been great, and lovely to see a familiar face. The course takes four days, and then I'm a qualified open water diver...but only down to 18 metres. So I started my advanced course the 5th day which means I can now go down 30 metres! I had a great diving buddy for the open water course, Swedish Emily, and we had lots of fun together. My diving buddy for the advanced was Swedish Ricardo who was lovely and we had some great dives. We did our underwater photography dives today which was lots of fun and slightly more challenging than being in a studio! I also lucked out with a lovely roomate, Palestinian Lanna who lives in Israel. She was great fun! I'm staying at Ban's which is the largest dive school in the world. Everyone here seems to LOVE diving, and its pretty much all anyone talks about. The island is really lovely, but I haven't exactly had much time to explore! I think I'll be staying a couple more days to see what else this one has to offer before moving on. The weather hasn't been very good, which doesn't matter when you're already in the sea, but not ideal for the beach!