Patsy in Bali

Ubud, Bali, Indonesia

It’s been a long time since Tioman, the last time I wrote. I got Purple Cow Sickness, and could not write a blog. Ella also got sick, although she didn’t get Purple Cow Sickness.

After Tioman we went to a place called Kuala Lumpur, which is a big, chaotic, trafficky city in Malaysia. It was very hard to get around, but we found a very nice mall that had a good food court and a nice place to walk around.

After Kuala Lumpur, we went to the oldest rainforest in the world, and it was pretty much a dud, and that’s where we got sick.

From there we went to Singapore, which was very fun. We went to the zoo and saw a lot of neat animals. No Purple Cows, unfortunately. Not even regular cows.

From Singapore we came to Ubud, which is a small town that is basically set up for tourists. Ubud is in Bali, and Bali is an island in Indonesia. We have been here about three weeks, and we have another week to go.

Here are some thoughts about Ubud and Bali:

What I like best. Hmm, that’s hard. Probably eating is one of the funnest things we do, because every two steps is a tourist restaurant with things like delicious home-made pasta and other things. Yesterday for lunch I had a delicious chicken burger and fries, and for dinner I had a delicious open-faced blue cheese sandwich with veggies on it. Purple cows don’t even usually like veggies, but these were delicious.

Another thing I like best is just walking around Ubud, because there is a holiday going on where everyone puts up decorated bamboo poles in front of their houses. The bamboo poles stick way up in the air and bend over at the top, and there are things like flowers and grass and leaves decorating them.

There are also these offering things everywhere. I think they are little banana leaves cut up. They have flowers and grass and rice and fruit sometimes and leaves and food sometimes. They’re very pretty, and they’re everywhere, stacked up. You have to watch out for them at your feet, or you’ll step on them. They put the offerings out on the streets. They dip a flower in water and wave it over the offerings. Sometimes they put a stick of incense on the offering, but sometimes not.

Another thing I like best: The weather is absolutely perfect, unlike everywhere else we’ve been where you step outside and immediately die of heat. In Ubud, it’s often breezy but sunny, and everything is very green. Sometimes it rains, but it rains mostly at night. It’s not too hot, and it’s not too cold. It’s sort of like early summer or early fall, except for all year long, every day.

What I like least. That’s even harder. There’s really nothing I don’t like about Ubud. I was worried about not liking Ubud, because we had come from the jungle and I was afraid that Ubud would be like that. And we were here for a month, so it would be bad if I didn’t like it. But I love it, so don’t worry.

The most fun I have had. Reading and swimming. First, reading: There is a library nearby, and we go at least once a day. Today is a holiday, and so unfortunately the library is not open, so I had to stock up on books before. It’s very fun when you are traveling with not very many books to suddenly have a library with a wonderful selection of them. And the library is two-minute walk away. I read about a book a day. Purple Cows love to read. I read one book that was written in Australia that I had never seen before in the US. It was funny and good.

Then, swimming: There are two of the nicest pools I have ever seen that are a 30-second walk from the place we are staying. My favorite is a hotel pool. It’s never crowded; in fact, usually it’s empty except for us. It has two boards that are like kickboards, and there is a ramp that leads down the deep end, and you can stand on the kickboards and slide down it. And since it’s always empty you can paddle around and take up as much space as you want. We go there every day if it’s sunny, and it’s very fun.

The most like home. Everything here is like home compared to Malaysia. Everyone speaks English. Everyone. Also, the places we’re staying feel like home because we’ve been here a while. Also, you can get delicious food like at home, except it’s better and much less expensive than at home. There’s a sort of jungly feel to it like home too. You hear frogs and crickets and birds, whereas in Malaysia we were mostly in big cities, so we didn’t hear that.

Money. The money here is called Indonesian Rupiah. There are no US dollars. One US dollar equals 10,000 Rupiah. So a 10,000 Rupiah note seems like a lot, but it’s not - it’s really one dollar. When you try to pick out the right money to pay someone, because there are so many zeroes they sort of blend in with each other, and you have to count the zeroes before you can be sure. Yesterday we were trying to find 80 cents, which would be 8,000 Rupiah. We kept picking out one dollar (10,000 Rupiah) instead of 10 cents (1000 Rupiah), or ten dollars (100,000 Rupiah).

We get our money from ATMs, but we go to ATMS a lot more than at home because not many places take credit cards. The ATMS give out Indonesian Rupiah (Indonesian money), not US dollars.

The cutest thing I have seen. The other day we took a taxi out to some different sights. One of the sights was a rice field view. A rice field is a place where you grow rice. In the rice field there was a mother duck and about 10 ducklings waddling around. You could barely see them, because the rice was taller than them. They were paddling around in the water that they put in the rice fields to help the rice grow.

The best food I have eaten. I think probably it was a restaurant out in the rice fields, where I got a home-made mushroom pizza. To get there, we walk through beautiful rice fields, on a narrow path that is just wide enough to walk on. You wouldn’t think anyone would go there, and yet every time we’ve been, it’s been fairly crowded. I can see why, though, because everything we’ve had has been delicious.

The restaurant is called Sari Organic, and it serves mostly organic food that is grown in a large garden right beside the restaurant. You sit at tables that overlook the rice fields. The rice fields are set up in terraces that look sort of like a giant set of steps.

One of my other favorite restaurants is called Tutmak Café. Mostly there I get toast and eggs and bacon, which are the best I’ve ever had. All of the restaurants are open. You don’t open a door to get into them, you just walk in. There are no glass windows because the weather is so nice. The windows are just open.

My last favorite restaurant is called Bali Buddha. We go there a lot, because it’s so good. Every single thing we have tried there has been delicious. Most of the times we’ve been I’ve gotten these Mexican tacos, which are crunchy tacos with beans, sour cream, salsa, guacamole, shredded carrots, and a few other delicious toppings to put on them. Purple Cows love Mexican tacos, especially in Indonesia.

The weirdest food I have eaten. Most days we eat Padang food. Padang food is a kind of Indonesian food served in the area around Padang, on the island of Sumatra, where a big earthquake just happened. I get fish and potatoes and rice with a funny sauce on it. The potatoes are balls of fried mashed potatoes, I think. There are probably 20 different bowls and plates of food, of which I get the least strange. Some of them look like whole fish cooked in a sauce. There are lots of weird things that you can’t even recognize. But I never knew how much Purple Cows like potatoes and fish.

The most interesting thing I have done. The other day we went on a taxi tour. When you walk around Ubud, a bunch of people say, “taxi, taxi, taxi, taxi.” They want to take you on a tour around Ubud’s surrounding areas, where there are neat sights.

One day we did this. We went to this temple where there was this pond of evil water. It had what looked like black dirt with water, and it was billowing in ripples, and it sort of looked like what a volcano erupting looked like. We were at this holy water temple. But there was a section of evil water. It looked like evil water, because it had what looked like a layer of oil on the top and it was darkish.

Where we sleep. We are sleeping at a very nice guesthouse that has a very nice porch that it’s fun to sit and read on because the weather is so perfect. Right now we are typing on the porch. In front of me are stone statues of deer and Balinese gods playing instruments and a stone shrine or small temple where they put offerings. There are umbrellas covering the statues and shrine things, I guess to give them shade. There’s also a lot of greenery. It looks like a tree-trunk with overflowing leaves coming off of it. It looks like the jungle. There’s nothing like it at home. When you sit on the porch, you hear crickets and birds chirping.

Every morning we are served delicious breakfast on our porch at our guesthouse. I get banana pancakes or a fried egg. Did you know that Purple Cows love fried eggs?

We are right in the middle of Ubud, and yet in a completely quiet place. We can sit on our porch and not hear any motorbikes or cars or city noises, and yet be a two minute walk from one of Ubud’s main roads.

Where we eat. Either at tourist restaurants or Padang food restaurants. We described these above.

How we get around. We walk. The sidewalks of Ubud are very uneven and have lots of holes in them, so you have to watch where you step. There aren’t really cars, except for the ones that tourists rent - mostly just motorbikes.

Shops in Ubud. A lot of the shops here have beautiful clothes for tourists with beautiful fabric and beautiful designs on them. Some have things like puppets that are built off of a stand, and you can control their arms and turn their head. The puppets are hand-made, with a lot of detail on their faces. You can see every single eyelash. They’re wearing clothes that are brightly colored, with a lot of gold. The clothing sort of swamps the puppet - it’s not just their clothing. It’s special Indonesian clothing that we don’t have at home. The skirts are called sarongs, and the fabric is called batik. There are countless other things like the puppets - masks, wooden carvings, stone carvings, jewelry, flower barrettes, clothes. Lots and lots of carvings.

Balinese dance and music. We have gone to see several Balinese dances that are out in the open in the Ubud Palace. The stage is usually just a small expanse of stone covered with fabric. When the dancers come out onto the stage, they come through this big gold door, and down a flight of steps.

Balinese dance includes a lot of moving of eyes and twitching of fingers. The costumes often have masks or large headdresses. One we went to see had a dog that had two people in it. It was a giant costume that sort of rested on their heads, and you couldn’t see the actual people. It looked like giant dog.

A lot of times there isn’t very much movement, but the people’s eyes are moving, or their fingers are twitching, or they’re inching along somewhere. It doesn’t look like they’re just standing there; it looks like they’re moving more than they are. You don’t really register that they’re moving, but they are.

For the music, there are actually people there playing what’s called a gamelan. They play it by hitting things that look like a xylophone or metalophone. They hit bars with small hammer-like thingys. There are also gongs and flutey things. There are around 20 people playing the various instruments. The music sounds like high-pitched gongs. Nothing really repeats itself in the music. You can’t tap your foot to it at all. But it doesn’t sound out of place. It sounds strange, but not out of place. It’s hard to describe, because it’s unlike any music that Purple Cows have ever heard before.

Volcano. We went to see a volcano on a taxi trip. It looked like a mountain with no top on it. There was like a ditch were it would erupt. There was a small eruption in 2005, and you could still see where the lava had been, because it was black. The lava had scorched the mountain, and where the lava hit it, it was black. There was a small mound of green in the middle of the black. It had been on a hill. It was a very small eruption, and there wasn’t enough lava to cover the hill. It was really, really neat, but it’s hard to capture how neat it was.

Monkey Forest. We went to a place called Monkey Forest. It’s a forest with monkeys in it. We walked through on a path, and monkeys would come and get very close to us. A lot of them had little babies that were very cute.

Ubud is really fun. It’s good to be in one place for a month. It’s very different from Malaysia or Singapore. I will probably be ready to leave after a month, but I’m glad we spent a month here.

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