My dad is a scuba instructor, and he recently won four tickets to go diving in the Seas Aquarium at Epcot in Orlando. This, along with my friend Eggybird's interest in getting Scuba certified, finally convinced me to get certified myself.

And what an amazing experience it was.

The aquarium is one of the biggest in the world, beat only by the Georgia Aquarium in size. We got in after a tour of the facilities, and it was so cool! There were nurse sharks, reef sharks, groupers, a couple HUGE turtles, and a WHOLE LOT of fish. We got to wave to the park-goers, as well as people eating dinner, since a restaurant looks into the aquarium. It was kinda funny: I was hovering around the dining room wall, and one of the guys near the window pointed to his food, pointed at me, and rubbed his belly. I took my reg out of my mouth and stuck my tongue out at him. Every one at his table (and several people at other tables) started laughing.

Oh, and a rule about underwater with a mask: everything seems one-third bigger and one-third closer. But it's still impressive when an 8 foot nurse shark cruises right by you, so close that you could reach out and touch it. (But I didn't, 'cause I'd get in trouble if I did...)

Sadly, we weren't allowed to bring cameras in the water, else I'd SO have some pictures to post. Nope, they had a camera guy down there, recording us so at the end of the dive we could pay them $25 for a DVD of the adventure. Which we did. XD
When I first saw myself on the DVD I was like," SOMEBODY MURDER ME." I was one of the last in "line", so it was: straight swimmer, straight swimmer, straight swimmer... and then here I come, bouncing along the bottom on my knees. But dad said I was doing fine, because most of the other "straight swimmers" were flailing their arms quite a bit (which is something you want to refrain from doing) and I wasn't.

All in all, it was an AMAZING experience, and great for beginning divers like me.^^ I would definitely recommend it to anyone.