The "Internship" begins...

We woke the next morning after a few hours of sleep in between the sweat, bugs, tossing and turning.  The instructions were to show up at the dive shop at the Iberostar in Playacar.  Playacar is just an extension of Playa del Carmen to the south side where most of the bigger, nicer resorts are all located at.  We easily found a taxi, managed to scrap together some of our stellar Spanglish skills to let the driver know where we were going, and $7 later found ourselves at the front gate to the resort.  After stumbling through some more Spanish to the gate guard and another non-English speaking lady on a phone we eventually managed to get inside the resort.  Turns out the “appointment” we had didn’t exist and we had to come back in a few hours when the guy we were supposed to meet was around.  We eventually wound up on the very beautiful beach to kill some time.  Interestingly enough Ashley and a couple of her girlfriends had had a long weekend trip to this exact Iberostar the year before…  When the time finally came, we signed some paperwork, got our uniforms, and then had a pointless meeting with a guy who still wasn’t the guy we were told we would meet with.  He asked us a few generic questions that we had already answered in the application process, then sent us to the dive shop on the beach to get a quick rundown of how things were going to be as told to us by the base leader.  We were told we would have (only) one fun dive a day, help out around the shop a little bit, be spending most of the day in the pool doing demos, and were expected to sell anything and everything at all times.  

This, along with the way everything else had gone the past two days was not exactly what we were expecting, but we gave it the benefit of the doubt.  We thought, “How terrible could it really be?  We have a dive job on the beach in frickin’ Mexico!”  Unfortunately for us, the string of mishaps, lack of organization, and hints of misconception would turn out to be all so telling…