Sallying Forth to Indonesia

After my last blog post, my good friend Breanna wrote me, "Sounds like you need a vacation." It hadn't hit me at the time, but that was exactly what I needed. It was a little rough getting back into the groove of teaching yesterday, but a short trip to paradise is worth the jarring return to reality, right?

So here's what I did: I went to Indonesia with four ETA friends--Achsah, Katie, and Qorsho--and briefly met up with another ETA, a self-styled (but ersatz) Kentucky colonel (look it up) named Ken. Our first stop was Bali, and then we spent 3 days in Yogyakarta. Side note: Yogyakarta is impossible to spell, so you can pretty much write it however you want and call it Yogya (or Jogja) for short. One postcard I bought of "The Olden Days Indonesia" spells it Djokjakarta. Who the heck knows.

I left thinking I would love Yogya, the "cultural heart" of Java, and tolerate Bali, the playground of Julia Roberts. In the end, my experience was exactly the reverse. Expectations are a funny thing. I would recommend against having them, if I didn't find fantasizing about trips almost as fun as the actual travel.

Bali felt like a wonderland. First of all, we stayed here:

Ok, to be fair, this is a view from the main hostel building, not the small outbuilding next door where we stayed.

Our hostel was about an hour's drive away from the center of a town called Ubud, in the interior of Bali. I don't even want to tell you how incredibly cheap it was. Let's just say that the conversion rate between the Indonesian rupiah and the good ol' USD is 10,000 to 1. We arrived in the evening (free airport pick-up!) and the weather was cool. Actually cool. As in, I put on a hoodie and enjoyed having a blanket for the first time in months. 

Things continued to be magical on our first full day. I thought my eyes might pop out of my head during our first ride into town. You can't help but notice, aside from how vibrantly green everything is, how ornately decorated every mundane nook and cranny of the island is. It seems that there is a Hindu temple every 10 feet, and everywhere you look there are beautifully carved stone gates and statues. Everything was even more done up while we there, because the town was preparing for a festival. The temples were swathed in colorful fabrics and the streets were overrun with huge bamboo poles strung with colors (see pictures, hard to describe). I kept stepping on little tiny plates made of bamboo with offerings of flowers and food in them. I hope this is not majorly bad karma. 

When we got into town, the feast for the eyes continued. We quickly gawked at the temple in the pictures below and then decided it was time for a feast for the stomach. Luck led us to an incredible restaurant called Casa Luna that served Western and fusion food that was actually good by Western standards. Unheard of. We went there twice and had things like Balinese style paella, pumpkin ravioli, a Mediterranean sampler plate with baba ganoush, and smoked salmon with guacamole and feta cheese on toasted French bread. Oh, and an avocado and coffee milkshake. Oh, and the most I paid for a meal (drinks included) was under $10. After lunch, we wandered around town, did some shopping, and found ourselves getting completely legit hour-long massages for $6.50. 

Qorsho and Katie, imitating carvings again. Typical.

They do a really good job with doors in Bali. Forgive the badly-framed photo. Sorry, Donna! 

Bamboo pole thingy!

Obligatory.

The next thing we did was pretty odd. We decided to go to the Antonio Blanco Renaissance Museum on a whim. It looked cool when we drove past it. Also, it was an excuse to walk down this street:

Despite the fact that I remembered reading in the guidebook that Blanco specialized in "erotic art," in we went.

The first thing we noticed was the miscellaneous assortment of colorful tropical birds in cages outside the museum. Then this:

The mysterious object you see in scaffolding is a huge sculpture based on Don Antonio Blanco's signature. The brochure bills it as "the world's largest signature." Dubious. Turns out our Antonio is a crazy Spaniard who married a Balinese dancer. Most of his paintings feature scantily or not-at-all clad Balinese dancers. Some involve terrible poems he wrote. Some involve Michael Jackson. The brochure dubs him "the Dalí of Bali," but I'm not buying it. It was absolutely the most hilarious museum I've ever been to. It had nothing to do with the Renaissance, by the way, unless you consider Blanco's own personal rebirth in Bali, I guess. The view from the roof made it all worth it, if the laughs weren't enough to convince you:

My days in Bali are all blending in my mind. It might've been this same day that we went to a traditional dance performance that tells part of the story of the Ramayan. The dance is called kecak, and the performance we went to was 100% for tourists. Still delightful. One of the most exciting parts for me was in the beginning, when a chorus of men came out chanting/singing and then sat in a circle around some candles and did a song/dance that was much like this scene in The Fall--of course this made me think of all the ladies I've watched that movie with, principally my long-lost sister KATHLEEN, with whom I've watched it more times than I can count. It's completely ridiculous that the simple fact of this dance being in a movie would make me so fascinated, but I was internally leaping out of my seat and yelling, "This is just like that movie!" I guess part of it  was because I thought the scene in the movie was completely made up, with no basis in reality. Beyond that, though, there is just something about seeing things come to life that you've read about or seen it a movie that adds excitement. I wonder what that's about on a psychological level--in a way it doesn't really make sense that this should be so thrilling. Maybe it's about expectation and imagination and fantasy once again? Anyway, the program said the dance would involve a man walking through burning coconut husks. I assumed this would be like walking across hot coals and would involve stepping over embers. Nope. A stringy old man on a hobby horse walked across a heap of still-very-much-on-fire coconut husks, kicking them to the sides of the floor where the audience was seated and making tourists like me draw back their feet in alarm. He did this for a good five minutes, and I couldn't take my eyes off it. It looked really painful. 

Burning coconuts, see?

That's all time and the internet will allow for now. Stay tuned for future installments, probably next week. The rest of this week is taken up with a Fulbright meeting and a 3-day English camp.