I came back to Bali after my Lombok trip mainly to go to Ubud and see a show of Balenese dance - Legong. Ubud's known as Bali's cultural center and is described as THE place if you want to experience the traditional arts.
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I was lucky enough to have found a lovely CS host, Edang, who even happened to be in Kuta the day I needed to go to her place, so I got a ride right into Ubud. We were joined by another surfer, an Italian girl called Elisa.
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Edang suggested we make a little detour just before Ubud to walk a rice trail. I was most grateful we did, 'cause the surroundings were truly captivating.
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| With the ever positive Edang. |
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Apart from being a cool host, Edang also lived in an amazing small house, which consisted of one big room, a bathroom and a small kitchen. It was also one of a few houses owned by the same family and were all constructed around a small type of a patio with a swimming pool and a gazebo.
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Looking for serenity in the garden, a beautifully
peaceful place.
peaceful place.
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| An employee of a warung preparing an altar in the morning. |
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| An oasis of green found during a walk through the city. |
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| Shopping time! |
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I was walking around Ubud with another Elisa and went into one of the clothes stores. We saw it had a backdoor leading into an inner garden shared by a couple of buildings and asked if we could see it. The store assistant ushered us to go along and when we did, we disovered a gazebo in the middle of the patio (very common). And by the gazebo, we discovered cages with... bats!
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| And rather big ones at that! |
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| One of them woke up.. look at those eyes - brrrr |
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After some shopping (here wearing my brand new Balenese silk dress [apparently I got a really good price - they wanted 350k rupiah, I paid 150k ;)] and my owl bag [patchworked batik silk, from 120k down to 35k rupiah :D]), we headed to the Monkey Forest. My companion was taking most of the pictures, but unfortunately they got accidentally deleted... and so that's all I've got.
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On our way back stopped for some street food and had a very interesting talk with one of the shop owners. Of course she couldn't help asking "Why don't you have a boyfriend? So pretty and no boyfriend?", a question I'd notoriously hear all around the country.
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This actually is one of my favourite pics from Bali, as it summarizes the whole island - everyone eats chicken all the time, drives a scooter and lives in a house with beautifully ornamented gates.
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| Some small road leading to nowhere - more rice fields to be exact. |
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One of the biggest surprises, and lessons learnt, during the trip - we were walking the above pictured road, somewhere in the middle of Ubud's nowhere, and went past a small kiosk (I wouldn't call it a store even - some snacks and a couple of drinks), in front of which an elderly woman was making altars for sale. Now when you see a person like this, in a place like this, what do you think? Most probably something similar to what we did - an old lady, probably a hard life of harvest behind her, maybe she hasn't ever left the island, we'll see if she even speaks English. So you chat the lady up and in her clear American accent, she starts telling you how she used to work in Boston for a big American company. So what was it about not judging people by their appearance?
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