The accommodation at the dive school is really cool. Right on the beach with their own pool to do our practice diving in. On our first day we learnt the basic hand gestures to say if we're ok etc and how to switch to someone else's air supply under water if ours fails to work, take our masks off for a minute, find them and fill them with air again.
On the second day we finished off the rest of general safety crap we had to do in the cold pool.. And then went out for our first dive in the sea. We were driven out maybe a mile and went down to about 16m, the most we can go on our open water course and saw pretty much the entire cast of finding nemo. We did our mask retrieval and emergency stuff we practiced in the pool. After a couple of minutes you really don't even realise your over half a swimming pool length under water just floating above the coral.