Night Rating

I started my night rating tonight, 1.6hrs and about 10 touch and goes in
the dark. Wow, so different. Flying on instruments is fairly easy, but
initially I had some problems orienting myself because things look so
different at night. It does not help that all the runway lights are on
and so it's easy to glance out of the window and look down the other
runway, confusing at first. I got the hang of it, so much so that the
last 5 landings were without the landing light, I flared too high and
dropped in on the first landing, but I only made that mistake once. It's
quite hard to land at night, even with the landing light on, with the
landing light off it was far trickier. Tomorrow my training progresses
to a full electrical failure so landing without flaps and with no lights
at all and a red lensed torch in one hand, or in my teeth or somewhere
useful.
There is just something crazy about flying a single engined aircraft at
night, it has that same feeling as when I go swimming in the ocean at
night and it is all black everywhere and there is that feeling that
there is something down there in the dark somewhere, but I'm not sure
exactly what.