The sun was just setting as we left the airport in Bali on Wednesday. We could see the yellow and orange of the sky behind the city’s new and traditional buildings. We were picked up (a first for us) and taken about an hour away to Ubud. Daddy talked to our driver, who shared many interesting ideas about Indonesia. He explained how the central government in Jakarta put pressure on Bali for development that conflicted with the Balinese people’s desire to protect the environment. He explained how Balinese Hinduism was about everything being connected with the gods (one god with different faces) and nature.
We stayed at a beautiful small hotel, called Kano Sari Villa, in Ubud. The backyard was a sea of jungle. You could faintly hear the waterfall, and each morning roosters would crow to wake us up. We also heard monkeys. Our rooms looked out onto the dense forest and the beds were covered in a clear canopy of fabric (mosquito netting).
Parts of Ubud were very tourist oriented, filled with restaurants and small shops. Other parts of the town were residential with traditional Balinese homes. Many of them looked like temples and others were small, plain buildings. Each house – really a family compound – had a family temple, that was used daily. Offerings of food and flowers in small baskets could be found everywhere and we constantly saw women making these offerings, by placing them down and lighting incense. The streets were packed with motorbikes.
On our first day in Ubud, we visited Alia, a colleague of Daddy’s from PICO, who happened to be in Bali with her family the same time we were.
On our second day in Ubud, Daddy and I (Natalia) took a cooking class. We first went to a traditional market, where we learned about the different fruits grown in Bali. These included mangosteen, salak (snakeskin fruit) and rambutan. They showed us spices that are used in Balinese cooking, all of which looked much fresher than the spices we have in the U.S. They took us to a rice field where they explained that they are able to get three crops of white rice a year, but only two crops of brown rice. The rice is harvested in terraces with an irrigation system organized by families in a village.
The cooking class took place in a family’s house and we learned about family traditions in Balinese culture. When people get married, the bride and groom go and live in the groom’s family compound. This means that some houses have thirty or more people living together. When a baby is born, the placenta is buried in the courtyard of their house — on the right of the entrance to the house for a boy and the left for a girl. This is thought to protect to the child during its lifetime.
Meanwhile, Mommy and I (Isaiah) went to the Agung Rai Museum of Art (ARMA). There were two kinds of paintings: modern, which were similar to the ones at the Smithsonian, and traditional, in the centuries-old Indonesian style. After that, we walked over to the Sacred Monkey Forest Sanctuary, a very small forest full of long-tailed macaques. The forest also had a temple and a cemetery. Unlike in other forests, all of the monkeys gathered around the area where the visitors were, because that was where the food was (a stand sold bananas you could feed to the monkeys). There were about 200 monkeys in the forest. Several monkeys climbed on tourists.
-Natalia and Isaiah