Christmas in Bali

Merry Christmas! (a.k.a. Happy Holidays)

I slacked off on the blog writing for a while, sorry for any inconvenience that may have caused. Right now it’s the end of the day on Christmas. I spent the morning surfing, then I visited the Shell Museum in the afternoon. For dinner I went to a restaurant and ate shark fin soup and Kung Pow Squid and washed it down with a Mai Tai. Afterwards I struck up a conversation with a German guy who has been living in Australia for the last two years. Relaly interesting guy, we exchanged stories for the next 2 hours or so and downed 4 beers each! Here’s a picture of the aftermath,

As for the rest of the trip there’s a lot I could talk about, but I’ll just give a quick recap of some stuff that happened. I’ll try my best to make a nother post about my next 4 days before I leave for Colorado. The rest you’ll just have to infer from Facebook pictures.

Food

Bali has been great! I’ve eaten some great food, but the best was at a middle-eastern style place that served things like kebabs and gyros. I got some lamb schwarma that was spectacular! The squid I had tonight was a Chinese dish and was awesome. Here’s a picture:

The Indonesian food that I’ve eat has been mostly just fried rice and maybe some chicken on a stick covered in peanut sauce. I never really got a sense of how Indonesian food stand sout from all the other Asian genres of cooking. I think I can blame the tourism for that.

People

The people of Bali are very nice. I spent most of the night talking with the German guy about the culture here. By US standards the people here are unbelievably poor. Some make $80 a month for an entire family and consider it good money. Some of the tourists here can be very rude and to think they have to put up with that while watching the same people spend an amount equivalent to their monthly income every day. The population is mostly Hindu and the temples demand money for certain occasions which can wreck havoc on families finances, but they still pay. It would be nice to befriend more of the locals and learn about how they cope with this lifestyle as well as about the rampant corruption, but I have shit to do (like my PhD).

Drving

I’ve been driving a scooter around a lot and I’m realizing the traffic never goes away. It’s a rare occasion when you can really yank on the throttle. The road here is insane! But at the same time you rarely see accidents on the road. There are no posted speed limits. The lines are the roads are merely a suggestion. Horns are used to let someone know you are passing them, so you wind up using it every 20 seconds or so. Given all this chaos everyone on the road is a very respectful driver. If the roads were anything like this in the USA people be going postal. Most of the time when the traffic is “stop and go” you have to put your feet down to stabilize the bike, which puts your feet inches away from rolling car tires. Pretty scary at first, but now I would consider myself a pro!

Surfing

I’ve been surfing a bit, but I still have a long way to go. My arms get tired from all the paddling so I really have to watch out for the currents. I spent a couple days down in southern Bali on the Bukit peninsula, which has many world-famous breaks such as Uluwatu and Padang Padang. I’m nowhere close to being able to surf those, but it was cool to see other people showing off their skills. I came back up to an area called Seminyak that has better waves for me. I caught a lot of good waves over the last couple days. I think I need to buy a board to keep at my parents house in Oregon so I can keep my skills up when I visit them.

Now some bad news…

1. I lost my GoPro Camera!!!!

I was so sad. I put it on my head when Steph and I were surfing at Kuta beach, but when I wiped out on a wave it fell off and I couldn’t find it. The visibility of the water was actually very good, but the waves kept making the water cloudy and pushing everything around, so all hope was lost. That thing was so great, I may buy another one when I get back.

2. I got robbed by the Balinese Police!!!

This is actually a very common thing. They set up to see you do something anyone would do on a busy street that is unfamiliar. Maybe you don’t use your blinker or maybe you run a yellow light. In my case I crossed an uncontrolled intersection onto a one-way street going the wrong way. I saw the small “Do Not Enter” while I was in the middle of the intersection and I immediately started to stop, but I had too much momentum and rolled into the street. It wasn’t really a safety issue because there weren’t that many cars on the road, giving me plenty of room to turn around, but a cop flagged me down and went through the ritual. The last part involves a different cop telling me they needed to write me a ticket and would need to go to court and likely pay the maximum fine of ~$30, but if I paid him ~$10 he would “make it all go away”.  We paid the man and went on our way, but a fellow from the UK who had also been caught in the trap started arguing with them. When we finally left his bike was still there but he was nowhere to be seen.

3. I stayed in a sketchy place

Ok, I know I have control over this, but when I was looking for a room, I couldn’t find anything under $45/night and then I finally found this place for $12/night. The rooms looked fine. They had hot water and internet, so I thought I had found a decent place. After unpacking my stuff I started noticing how unsecure the rooms were. I looked up some reviews and one couple mentioned that the cleaning people would steal small amounts of money from them each day, but the management refused to do anything. I asked the manager this morning if anyone ever got stuff stolen from their rooms and replied with an enthusiastic “yes!”. He was smiling and chuckling as he said this. I repeated myself a few times to make sure he understood what I was asking and I still got the same response.

I put a small amount of money in the pocket of one of my shorts to see if they take it, but they never did! I also was able to buy a cable lock for my laptop so I didn’t have to carry it with me everywhere. For my last night, I found a great hostel with nice facilities and ice-cold AC. This place is brand new, but they could use more clean places like this in Bali. 

So that's probably it for my Bali blogging. Stayed tuned for all the pictures I'll be posting to Facebook once I get a connection that can handle it.