There is something about living in a foreign country that causes me to "go with the flow" much more often than I ordinarily would back home. When someone asks me if I want to do something here, the answer is almost certainly, "O.K. Sound good," regardless of the activity. I rarely think about what I'm agreeing to do.
"Do you want to join an Ultimate Frisbee league even though you don't know the rules to this sport?"
"O.K. Sounds good."
Should we go to a teddy bear themed DVD bang that exclusively plays crappy movies that were made ten or more years ago?"
"Count me in."
"Let's go to a sex museum teeming with phallic statues, puppets bent into shocking sexual positions, and uncomfortably giggling Korean couples."
"That could be fun!"
"Are you interested in going to the West Coast of Korea to drunkenly roll around in the mud with complete strangers all weekend?"
"That doesn't appeal to me at all. But sure. Why not?"
My recently discovered carefree attitude has caused me to wind up in a number of interesting situations, but it has never actually put me in serious danger. Until last Saturday. About 3 or 4 weeks ago, this query was posed to me:
"Should we risk our lives by diving into a confined aquarium loaded with sharks and other dangerous sea creatures?"
"Sign me up."
Ironically, the friend who originally asked me this question ultimately pulled out of the event due to the recollection of her shark phobia, but two brave friends and I nevertheless found ourselves in wetsuits and oxygen tanks a few weeks later. As is usually the case, I had no idea what I was in for. The world according to my imagination is impossibly disconnected from reality. When I previously imagined what my experience of shark diving would be, I expected to show up at the place, say "Yo. I'm Jess. I'm here to shark dive," and about 30-40 minutes later, it would be all over. I was expecting it to be mildly scary, but I somehow did not expect it to be complicated. I don't know why I thought a touristy aquarium would willingly allow a completely inexperienced foreigner who can barely swim and who knows virtually nothing about dangerous water animals to rapidly and freely jump into a tank full of sharks without first receiving proper training, but welcome to the world of my warped mind. It didn't take me long to realize, however, that the technical aspect of the dive was actually going to be a lot more challenging than the mental one. While a few captivated, docile, well-fed sharks who don't particularly enjoy the taste of humans realistically pose little threat to me, I realized that my own incompetency in the water could potentially threaten my existence. As soon as our diving instructor began talking about equalizing our masks, checking our O2 levels, and inflating our backpacks, I suddenly remembered that when I was 8 years old, I required private swimming lessons because I was such an idiot in the water. Luckily, I made it through training almost incident-free, but it wasn't especially easy. Even with your mouth firmly cusped around an oxygen tube, it still takes a huge leap of faith to submerge your head under a pool of saltwater and inhale for the first time. On my first try, I started spastically flailing around and taking rapid, panicky breaths, but after a few more tries it started to feel much more natural.
Upon the completion of training, it was finally time to get in the water. Much to my surprise, I never felt fear, even though several sharks were swimming two feet next to and above me. The experience mostly just felt surreal, and in some unanticipated way, peaceful. The only sound that could be heard was the sound of underwater bubbles and fish swimming. My inability to communicate verbally or to hear what was going on in the world outside the tank amplified my sense of sight since so much depended on it. It's incredible some of the things you think about in such bizarre circumstances and when certain senses are strictly limited. I would like to say that I thought about the meaning of life, the beauty of the world, the anatomy of sea creatures, or the potential danger that I was in. At the very least, I would like to be able to say that I felt such an incredible adrenaline rush that I couldn't possibly think about anything. However, instead, I thought primarily about three things. (a) I am cold, (b) I am hungry, and (c) I need to urinate. Perhaps when you are stripped of certain senses, you are left to only feel and think about your instincts. This is the lie that I'm going to tell myself to detract from the fact that I'm not a terribly complex individual at the core.
A few of the sharks that we shared the tank with...
Unfortunately, I don't have any visual proof of my dive at the moment, although we did create an underwater video of it that will be mailed to us soon. However, several Korean tourists do have visual proof of my dive. Living in and walking around Korea as a foreigner often feels comparable to being a zoo animal, but diving into a shark tank and being pointed at and photographed by gawking tourists took this metaphor to an all too literal level. I felt compelled to wave back at them to keep them sufficiently entertained. Unfortunately, in order to get into the tank, you must climb down a rope attached to a glass tunnel through which tourists can walk. What this means is that I am confident several Koreans now have a photograph of my crotch. And that is the image I am going to leave you with...
Michael and I, shortly after the dive, feeling quite proud of ourselves.
