If At First You Don't Succeed...

... then sky diving is not for you.
Okay, first things first: I survived and it was great. I'm writing this post on Monday, because on Saturday I had neither paper nor time for a plog (paper blog), so I'm going to write what happened on Saturday. What happened on Sunday will be in the Sunday post. Makes sense, right?

I arrived at Lachen-Speyerdorf at 9 o'clock in the morning. Nobody was in any particular hurry, and it stayed that way all the time I've been there. Sky divers are relaxed by nature. I was in a group with three other people that were crazy enough to learn the high art of throwing yourself out of a plane and live to tell the story. Our trainer Andre was an old soldier and told us all we needed to know about falling elegantly and how to behave on the way down. It's amazing how many sky divers have a military background. It has been developed for military purposes of course, but the same is true for scuba diving, and I don't know a single scuba diving soldier myself. It's also interesting to note that all but two sky divers smoked, and there were quite a lot of them. I have no idea why they do it (and neither did they when I asked them), but I suppose being insane helps along the way.
There a lot of English terms in sky diving, like slider (the tiny piece of cloth that keeps the parachute from opening too fast), to stall (to brake in mid-air), to flare (to brake close to the ground) and cypress (automatic opening device), but most of them were German. Man, I would not have guessed that so much vocabulary learning would be involved!
We also spent a few minutes in a "simulator", i.e. in a harness hanging from the ceiling, to practice in a more realistic environment. German law says that between the simulation and the first jump, learners must sleep one night to make sure they really want to do it. Interesting enough, the harness feels a lot like climbing gear, so it wasn't such a big deal for me.

At 10 pm I arrived at Sonja's place (which is where the whole idea was born in the first place). She was kind enough to offer me shelter for the night. But ten isn't exactly late, so we went to Speyer to meet Sandra, who I haven't seen in quite a while. We sat in her living room and talked and talked and talked and suddenly it was 1:30 am. When we came back Sonja still had to prepare a mattress for me, so I didn't sleep before 2 am. Golly what a day!

Random factoid: "Free fall" means falling with a speed of ~50 m/s == 180 km/h == 110 mph. Imagine yourself on the front passenger's seat in a convertible that is going really fast. Now try to stand up. Yeah!