Om Swasti Astu

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Om Swasti Astu !

This is one of the first phrases we learned after arriving here in Bali Jan. 16th, 2008 and one of the

few I can still keep in my head to repeat as we interact with the Balinese.

This is a Balinese phrase, always well received as it is a wonderful greeting of heartfelt respect.

It is customary to also place the hands at the heart in prayer position when saying it. We learned this

phrase on our second day from a German who has spent a lot of time in Bali and knows Balinese fairly well.

Everywhere we walked with him one morning around the hotels people knew him and he was so warmly

received. Many Balinese are tremendously warm and curious toward us and almost always like to try

and open a conversation by asking us where we are from. Many people here can speak a little english

due to the rapid growth of tourism in the last two decades.

I love to interact with them, though it may be brief because there is always a very sweet heartfelt sort

of connection that occurs and they always make a sincere and kind attempt to speak english so that some

communication can happen. We are working on doing our "part" by expanding our vocabulary of Bainese

words a little but for me to succeed at this I have to write the words down and keep them in front of me

to remember. This is because Indonesian and Balinese sound very foreign to me. They sound as foreign

as Chinese and might as well be "celestial language" which I can speak very well ~ but that is just

sounds strung together and uttered which have no meaning, i.e. sounds like gobbel-de-gook!

People have said that Indonesian is easy to learn because there are no tenses like past and present to

learn. I find it very difficult to keep the sounds in my head AND remember what they mean!


When we arrived at the airport in Denpasar Bali and walked into the "terminal" ~ a very different

sort of terminal ~ a bit like the small ones you will find on other islands such as Hawaii, I was delighted

to see on the way to the baggage area two sort of shrines or temple places on either side of the hallway.

A sacred space right in the airport, that was refreshing. We took a cab right to the hotel Grand Kumala

not far away and very close to the beach. A friend had told us about this place and its sister hotel down

the street ~ a narrow alley with many little shops.

It was a lovely place with gardens and a pool. Our air conditioned room with small refrigerator was

$25.00 per night. The photo below shows the grounds and building with our first floor room.



We had a great surprise when we went to the dining area the next morning for the included

breakfast (which seems to be standard for accomodations here in Bali) and saw sitting there a man

we hadn't seen in 5 or 6 years who we thought we would never see again. A now 77 yr old english

gent who was on a visit to Bali for several months. It was delightful to catch up with him and hear

how he was doing since he had left the U.S. And he introduced us to the German, Max. We were

glad to be able to learn a little about the culture and language right away from some people who

had spent quite a bit of time there over years. That's how it seems to go here... serendipitous

meetings are more the rule than the exception and you begin to trust fairly soon that every-

thing is just going to go exactly the way it needs to so you might as well let go of any effort to

make anything happen. That is what I've been doing anyway, training myself to relax (inside myself)

more and just be able to receive the gift of this place.

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Photos

Hotel Kumala at Legian Beach
View of gardens and path leading to our first floor room

Drum shop near Hotel Kumala
Walking down the narrow street in front of our hotel we were drawn to try this guys' drums. We all got a lesson on his hand made drums. He was a fantastic drummer!

Sania's House Ubud
This is where we have been staying since coming to Ubud, Bali. We stayed in this room several nights and then moved to our 'tower temple' room on the 3rd floor.