Diving with Woody of Dive Talk!
Yesterday, I met one of my heroes. Yesterday, I took up a hobby that I love after setting it aside for almost a decade. I first started SCUBA diving while in Dahab, Egypt, at the tail end of a months-long research project on the political aspirations of rural Egyptian peasants in the context of the Arab Spring. My interviews with rural Egyptians had taken me all over the country, but I chose to end up in Dahab to transcribe my notes and take a breather because the beach town is very laid-back, relative to the rest of Egypt, it's cheap to live, and it lies right on the Red Sea. I chose Yalla Bar as my daily spot to eat lunch, smoke hookah, transcribe my notes, and to work on the first draft of my research project, which would become my master's thesis. As I wrote I watched a daily stream of divers trailing into and out of the water, and it reminded me of a childhood dream I'd had when we used to visit the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, which was about three hours' drive fr...