I've officially joined the kayaking club, and while I absolutely hate it, I love it, too. There's something about being on the water and zipping around on a river that's really awesome. There's also something about being in a tiny boat that will tip if you lean ever so slightly in the wrong direction that isn't so awesome. I have yet to kayak without flipping...but I've never flipped more than once in the same session...sooo...we'll call it even.
We had a session on Saturday that was in a nice warm pool. This is where we did the majority of our capsizing training, so I spent a majority of my time on the water, under the water. My best piece of advice to anyone who wants to start kayaking is to take your instincts and intuition and throw them out. Nearly everything you need to do in a kayak, especially while you're under the water, goes completely against what your body is telling you to do. So to survive on the water, you have to let go of all those animal instincts that helped us to evolve into the intelligent, lazy people that we are today.
Back to my main point, though. Noone likes walking around in wet underwear. I did it two days in a row. The first day, I went out early, before heading to the pool, to try and find some swimming trunks. One of the main stores didn't sell them at all, and the other advised me to "go check the sales area by the ladies' fitting rooms," as they were now out of season and everything out of season is hung on a rack with a bunch of women's clothing. Needless to say, I gave up and left. So I show up at the pool in athletic shorts, which isn't too bad, except for that I didn't pack any other boxers, assuming that I'd have had swimming trunks on, instead of underwear, when I took the dive. Wrong.
It wasn't enough that I was going to have to walk back in the biting cold, from a part of town that I wasn't yet familiar with, with a backpack full of wet clothes. I now had to take that walk with a squishy, clingy, really cold fabric between my legs the entire way. Now I realize that I could have tried to go commando and just avoid the complications of wet underwear, and normally i would have, but it seemed somehow wrong to go commando in England while I wasn't yet familiar with the country. It'll take more than a month of wining and dining before I'll let England get that far.
This brings me to day two, Sunday. We went out on the Thames again, and did some slightly more advanced stuff. In theory, learning all this slightly more advanced stuff is fine. It's only when they ask you to paddle as fast as you can, then turn as hard as you can without turning over that it gets rough. I turned over.
They taught us how to stay upright a little better, and how to stay upright while you were taking a hard turn. The only problem was, when I focused on learning how to make the kind of hard turn they were trying to teach me, I completely forgot the whole "staying upright" part of it. The river was really, really cold, but as time went on, and more and more beginners also took the plunge, I got over it. I met a couple of other Americans in the club, as well, but it seems like everyone from the states that's over here is doing graduate work. I also met a couple of doctors who were in the club, today, so at least I know that when I'm out in South Wales a couple of weeks from now, I'll have someone who knows how to save me should I come perilously close to death. And if the one does manage to save me, the other has experience in plastic surgery, so he'll be able to put humpty dumpty together again if anything horribly traumatic were to happen to my face. I need my face.
I'm kind of rambling now, and it's nearly 3 am, so rightly so. I kind of forget, from time to time, that I'm really three thousand miles away from home. It's both good and bad, I guess. Let me first reassure my parents and say that I still miss you, no worries there. As far as actually being in England goes, though, I no longer think of it as "being in England." It's more just like, "being," now.
