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Published: October 1st 2011
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Hi kids, Frankie took me somewhere very exotic last month...an island called Bali. Bali is part of Indonesia which is a country made up of lots and lots of islands in South East Asia. Most of the people in Indonesia are Muslim, but on Bali they are mostly Hindu. This makes the culture of Bali unique within the country.
Here are some of the things that Bali is famous for:
Beaches – lots of people come to Bali to relax on the beach or for their honeymoon. There is also good surfing here and it is very close to Australia so lots of Aussie's come here on holiday.
Dancing – there are lots of famous dances on Bali all relating to different ceremonies. Balinese people love to have a party and will find any excuse. Weddings, cremations, religious events, all are celebrated with music and dancing lasting all night or even longer. Some of the dances involve cool masks and costumes like the Barong which is a big hairy half-lion, half-dog animal that needs several people to dance inside it.
Volcanoes – Bali has lots of volcanoes and many of them are still active. Luckily none of
Me and a Cocoa tree
This is where chocolate comes from! them were erupting when I was there, but I climbed one called Gunung (Indonesion for Mount) Batur that has erupted quite a few times in the past 100 years. It was still steaming when I was up there which was nice because it warmed me up as it was quite cold 1700 metres up the mountain.
Tropical fruits and spices – Bali is near the Equator so it is hot and wet all year round. This means lots of yummy tropical fruits like bananas, mangoes and pineapples grow here. I also saw some weird fruits like jackfruit (which is bigger than me!) and snake-skin fruit (the skin really looks like the scales of a snake) and papaya (also called paw-paw) and cocoa (where chocolate comes from).
Monkeys – Where I stayed in Ubud (a town in the centre of Bali), there is a temple dedicated to monkeys. The monkeys (or long-tail macaques as they are properly called), are wild but people come to feed them so they are used to humans and get very close to you. One monkey tried to steal me from Frankie and she had to rescue me before the monkey started eating me!
They do a lot of unusual things on Bali (or at least different to what we do back in England), I'll tell you about a few of the things I learnt:
Names - There are only 4 names for Balinese people! It doesn't matter if you are a boy or a girl, you are named after the order that you are born. So the first child to be born is called Wayan, the second is Made, the third is Nyoman and the fourth is Ketut. If you have more than four children you just start over with Wayan again! This only applies to the commonest caste of people though.
On Bali there are also 4 castes, or classes, of people. Most people are in the common caste (called Sudra), but there is also the caste of high priests (called Brahmana), the caste of merchants (called Ksatriyasa) and the caste of nobility (called Wesia). If you are part of these higher castes then you get different set names and even have different languages. It started off so simple and now I'm confused!
Temples and Offerings – Balinese people are very religious and every community, even every family home,
Me and a religious statue
these statues are outside every house, restaurant, hotel and temple and represent different gods, ancestors and spirits. will have a temple. There are also shrines (religious statues) at the corner of every field and at road junctions, on bridges, next to very old trees etc. Every day the women prepare offerings to place outside their rooms, shops, at shrines, even on their motorbikes! These offerings are pretty little baskets made from palm leaves and filled with flowers and pieces of fresh food. They are given as signs of respect and thanks to the gods and ancestors, or to bribe demons into not causing trouble.
Sarongs – traditionally everyone wears a sarong, which is a piece of cloth you wrap around your waist and legs like a skirt. Even men and boys wear sarongs! If you want to visit a temple then you have to wear a sarong and a sash (a scarf tied around your waist). Lots of people in Bali only wear sarongs now when they go to the temples and prefer to wear shorts and a Manchester United shirt during the day!
A different calendar – Bali has nearly 2 years for every 1 of our years. This means Balinese people get 2 birthdays every year and they are much older than they
look!
Rice – rice is the main food people eat in Bali, for breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks and pudding. One person I met on Bali said he could eat 12 banana pancakes for breakfast, but if he didn't have some rice too then he would still be hungry! Every family will have rice paddies (wet fields where rice is grown). When the rice is harvested it has to be laid in the sun to dry, this is done wherever they can find a flat space, including in the middle of the road!
Cat-Poo-Cino – Yep, that's right, on Bali they have coffee made from cat poo!! It is the most expensive coffee in the world and costs £40 for a cup in London! There is an animal on Bali that looks a bit like a cat (it is called a Civet in English or Luwak in Balinese), and it likes to eat the best coffee berries it can find. It then poos out the coffee beans and people collect them, wash them, roast them over a fire and grind the beans up to make coffee powder. I don't like coffee so I didn't try it but other people
said it was very nice!
Kites – Kites are very popular toys on Bali and are often made in the shapes of birds and dragons. If you look up anywhere in Bali you are likely to see a few kites hanging high in the air. Balinese children practice kite flying a lot and there are competitions where you try to knock other people's kites out of the sky.
Rent-a-Playstation – most people on Bali are very poor compared to people in England, Australia etc. A lot of people live in houses with no tv or computers. Instead, as a special treat, you can go to a little shop in most villages where they have 3 or 4 playstations set up and you can pay a small amount of money per hour to play games.
I really enjoyed my time on Bali and it was interesting to see how different people live in far away countries. It was very hot on Bali, as hot as the hottest summer day back in England. One thing I didn't like was the traffic. There are lots of cars and motorbikes and no driving rules or driving tests so people drive
as fast as they can and it is very scary to cross the road. At least I am flat already so if I get run over I can't be squashed any more than I already am! Luckily I survived the roads and now Frankie is taking me to Malaysia (another country in South East Asia) and then to New Zealand (a small country below Australia).
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