Bali Days, Hanging out in Ubud

Well I just read Dave's last blog and I should have known better. Now I am intimidated. Who knew the guy was such a good writer? But here goes anyway.

As I said n my last blog, we visited the Sacred Monkey Forest twice. Anika has lots of pictures from it on her blog Sweet Dreams & Lots Of Traveling. But here is one strange monkey we saw -

The Dave Monkey

We have been in Ubud over three weeks and have about two and a half to go. I keep thinking of all the people I know who have been to Bali and their memories of it. I think anyone who was here before 2000 would be shocked by the level of development every where but especially Ubud. It has been interesting how easily we have settled in and the days have flown by. We really have only been out of town about 3 times not counting the day we went river rafting, which was close to Ubud. In Ubud we have been going to yoga and eating lunch at various recommended restaurants. We met an couple from Hawaii who have been coming here every year for 12 years and they gave us tons of good recommendations and help. One typical day went like this:

Wake up have tea/coffee on our front porch. Dave and I go across the street to the farmers market and stock up. We talk to one of the farmers who has seen us every week at least once a week. He mentions there is a ceremony in his village to honor the animals. There will be cock fights (very popular here) and animal sacrifices. Nice way to honor the animals! He invites us along and we say we'll think about it and come back before the end of the market if we want to go. I have not been invited t a ceremony yet but Dave has been to the big cremation ceremony in town. After eating the home made organic mulberry/almond muffins we got for breakfast we discuss the day. Our plan had been to find a spa (of which there are many) and get massages. Ceremony for the animals or spa day, hmmm. Spa day won. I wrote post cards and Dave carved for a while. We went to the post office, mailed the cards and headed to the spa recommended by some fellow Cruzians we had met at the Green School (more on the Green school in another blog). Dave had 1 ½ hour massage. I had a 2 hour treatment that included massage, a body scrub, shower wash (never had a masseuse wash me before!) yogurt skin treatment and ended with a flower bath. As I lay in the bath surrounded by fragapini, rose and bougainvillea petals, sipping ginger/lime tea, I felt like a princess. I twirled the petals in my fingers and laughed out loud. Sometimes I feel so lucky to be on this trip having this time to relax and disconnect from my normal life!

Men admiring each others birds. Getting ready for the fight?

What was Anika doing during all this and what is she doing in general? Well she keeps busy. As I said in the last blog, Anika has been volunteering at a local private elementary school three times a week helping in the garden. She also has been spending time doing her school work mostly on the computer. She is doing math through a computer online program and playing chess with the computer. She reads a lot and her teacher is encouraging her to blog and do other writing. There have been more times here than before on the trip where she has not joined us in exploring or adventuring around. She is not taking any art classes, except for the one day she did batik with me. She loves having the house and is spending her time there as much as possible. Some times we make her come along, others we let her stay home.

There are two kinds of days for me, travel vacation days, like I described above where you mostly float through the day and relax, explore, enjoy, and travel work days. I am finding that you are always looking for a balance between exploring and experiencing and having down time and time to take care of business. We have had plenty of days where we tried to get laundry done, food shop ( Besides the farmer's market we also go to a more Western super market for some things.) make trip plans (Japan is taking lots of planning time.), catch up on email and blogs writing, or take care of paper work.

Here's one of many travel work things we have had to deal with. When we go there we got a tourist visa for 30 days, but we are staying for 42. So we talked to people, called our embassy and found out how to get an extension. It takes three visits to the main Immigration office by the airport an hour away and you have to leave your passports there. How people do it is they pay a Balinese person, who does this as a job, and this person goes back and forth dealing with all the paper work for you. So we did this. It is very scary to give your passport to anyone and have them drive off with it. But everything came back and we are good to go. Figuring all this out took some time and that is part of how a work travel day is spent. Lots of time is pent figuring out where to go what to see or do  how to get there how much to expect to pay how long it will take and a million other details. Thank goodness for Lonely Planet, the Internet and the advice of others!

This is us in Petulu a town right out side of Ubud. People go there to see the flocks of white storks and egrets that roost in the trees around the rice fields. We couldn't get good photos of the birds but our driver Radhay did get a good picture of us.