Bali

Just got back from Bali yesterday morning, and I figured if I don’t get a blog up this weekend I never will, so here is the news!

            The trip to Bali was with the freshman class at SMKI (which happens every year).  Bali is also called Pulau Mimpian or “Island of Dreams”, and it was indeed very beautiful.
     I thought the best part was all the Hindu temples- they are everywhere.  The most common temples are small and consist mainly of a shelf to place offerings; there are many along the side of the road to give safe travels. Offerings are placed in small wicker baskets, and can contain flowers, sweet bread, and other things. Offerings are supposed to be given every day, and I only saw Balinese people doing this in the morning (always in traditional dress) but I’m not sure if that’s a rule or just routine.

The temples in Balinese homes are even more remarkable. There are usually four or more temples built in the yard or on the roof, and they have statues of various Hindu gods above the offering shelves. The most stunning ones are topped with gold and sparkle wonderfully in the hot Balinese sun. Temples are generally wrapped in a sacred cloth, either plain yellow or black and white checked. I was told that the black and white symbolizes the daily presence of good and bad, but I'm not sure the meaning of the yellow. Occasionally there will be tree trunks wrapped in black and white checks, and this is where a new temple is going to be built. If there are regular unusual occurrences (for example frequent recurring deaths) in a certain area, Hindus believe this is because not enough offerings are being given to the gods, so they wrap the cloth around the trees to make the place sacred and then build a temple there.

SMKI visited a notable temple during the trip called Tanah Lot. Tourists weren’t allowed to walk up and enter the actual temple, but could make flower offerings (for the price of few thousand rupiah) either in a cave on the beach or in a cave on the temple island, though the last one requires a short wade through the ocean. After tourists make an offering, the temple-keepers (there is surely a special name for this, I don’t know it though) stick some grains of white rice on the tourists’ foreheads and put a flower behind their left ear. Perhaps this is just to entice people to make offerings, but it still looks lovely.

Temple surrounded by ocean.

This is the entrance to the cave where tourists could make offerings for Tanah Lot.

Despite the thrills of touring, the main event of our trip was to visit SMKI Bali and share performances there. Their school campus is gorgeous and clean, even the outsides of buildings, which is a rare occurrence in Indonesia. There is also an SMM (music school), and SMSR (‘seni rupa’ it’s called; “looking arts”. Maybe there’s a word for this in English but I don’t know what it is, or don’t remember. Anyways, it’s a school for painting, graphic design, woodwork… Macam-macam, many kinds).

The SMKI Bali karawitan performances were mesmerizing- you can see the drummer and first row of players on the left side of this picture- I simply love the dynamic quality of Balinese gamelan. Here is a two-man costume that was incredibly intricate and surprisingly life-like; the dancers inside were great at expressing the different moods of the character.

We also stopped at a traditional Balinese house that belonged to one of the SMKI Yogya teachers. There were around eighty students on the trip and we were all fed lunch here- a delicious (and fiery!) rice dish with salak for dessert.

And of course you can’t visit Bali without going to the beach! We visited two: Tanjung Benua and Pantai Kuta. The first was filled with mostly Asian tourists, and most everyone was there to go parasailing or boating. I went out on a glass bottom boat ride with a few friends where we fed bread to some small fish above a reef and then boated to a petting zoo on a small island offshore.  

Tanjung Benua

The glass bottom boat with Bu Yati and some of my XT1 classmates.

On the way to the petting zoo, we passed a temple with its entry opening to the ocean.

A large bird and I at the island petting zoo...

Pantai Kuta was so different- packed with tourists from around the world and almost everyone was surfing. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed my time at the beach (even got a pretty good farmers tan) but it made me want to be an American again so badly (figuratively speaking). Good thing I didn’t bring a swimsuit with me or I may have been overcome by temptation- I was incredibly jealous of everyone wearing bikinis, swimming, and tanning… Sigh. But there will be time for that later. I sat in the sand with my Indonesian buddies- they were wearing sweatshirts, sweaters, long jeans, and hats to protect their skin from the sun- and we people- watched for awhile. A few girls paid 10.000 rp to have their nails painted by an old Indonesian lady working the beach, and a group of students played in the waves (the teachers weren’t very happy about this, later the buses were full of sand and smelly with all the damp clothing).  Overall, a nice visit. I’m excited to show off my not-as-snowy-white skin when I go to school again J

A quick note about bahasa Bali, before I move on. Bali is a 45 minute ferry ride at most from Java, but Javanese and Balinese sound nothing alike. If you take the Javanese alphabet HA NA CA RA KA (pronounced ho no cho ro ko) and say it with a Balinese accent it becomes huh nuh chuh ruh kuh but with an odd nasally sound, like when you say une in French. Odd, no? So for example when our tour guide would say Pantai Kuta it sounded like Kutuh.

Near the end of the trip, we visited a beautiful lake in central Bali. I have painstakingly racked my brain for the name of the lake, and even requested an itinerary sheet from the trip, but to no avail. We all stopped to eat lunch at a lakeside restaurant and then visited a nearby fruit and traditional Balinese snack market. I bought a kilo of salak Bali (Balinese snakefruit- just found out it was called ‘snakefruit’ in English; I had never heard of it before) and a small carton of teeny strawberries, grown just down the road.  All the students say salak Yogya is better because it’s sweeter, but I like salak Bali because the first time I tried it, the taste reminded me of the very tip of strawberries in Minnesota, a bit sour. Surprisingly enough, the Balinese strawberries had no taste at all. So I’ll stick to salak from now on.

After mentioning the fruit market, this also brings up another recent undertaking of mine in my Indonesian exchange: haggling. Eeeeveryone haggles here, and I’m just starting to get the hang of it, though more often than not I still pay more than the average Indonesian. I find that, in general, people don’t want me around when they’re haggling a price. If I do happen to tag along, they manage to make a deal so quietly I always miss the selling price, and when I ask what price they settled on I usually don’t get a response. At first this was frustrating- a big problem for me is that prices are usually so cheap anyways (compared to the States) I don’t haggle as low as I should, but I can never figure out what a good deal is because everyone is so secretive when I’m around. And then after my purchase is done people ask me what I payed : “Andrea! Tidak usah sampai harga itu!” everyone says, "You don’t have to pay such a high price! I got the same for… (always lower than what I paid)…" I did have a few successes while on the Bali trip, thankfully. There was a theatre student who paid 8.000 rp for a carton of strawberries which I got for 5.000 rp, and I managed to get the same price for a souvenir at a large arts market as another student as well. Ha! So it is possible, though surely difficult. The key is to not look rich and not look foreign. Everyone started telling me I need to dye my hair black in order to blend in, but somehow I don’t think that would help much…

We also visited Patung Garuda Wisnu Kencana- an unfinished park of statues that also holds Balinese dance performances for tourists. 

This is an incomplete Balinese gamelan (or perhaps a different type of traditional music ensemble) that performed at the tourist shows in the park. We watched a phenomenal theater performance by a group of students from a school for the deaf. They were perfectly coordinated and very expressive; it was a treat to watch. At the end, there was a female Balinese dancer in traditional garb that would dance and invite different spectators to come on stage and dance with her. She was pleasantly surprised when an SMKI Yogya student walked onstage and began dancing tari Bali with her! I suspect that they rarely get audience members that are able to dance traditional Balinese-style. 

Looking back to when the Bali Rotary Inbounds visited Yogya, I remember they said that the Balinese like three types of food: really spicy, really sweet, and peanuts. I have yet to try the spicy and the sweet, but peanuts are definitely a big hit there. Every souvenir shop sold several different kinds but the most famous is kacang asin, which is said to help women conceive and produce milk. I didn’t try any, but asin means salty, so I’m guessing it’s not far from, well, the average salted peanut. Things on my list to try when I go back to Bali (and this is indeed going to happen, someday): ayam betutu (Bu Yati said it is like opor, which means the chicken is boiled in coconut milk but it’s very spicy) and babi guling (pork).  It was odd to see signs advertising pig meat at first- I’ve never seen a sign for pork in Java and whenever my host family talks about it, they always bring it up in a whisper (because of the Muslim majority). Anyways, I don’t know what guling means, but I hope it means ribs. Yum.

While on the subject of food, I’m going to back track a ways and throw in the latest adventure: eels. Maybe baby eels, since they were so small. This culinary opportunity came about when I went to the restaurant Pecel Solo with a few Rotarians about a week ago. At first sight I knew I wanted to try it. I thought it was snakes, but when I asked what it was “belut” was the response and Bu Clara clarified ‘a type of fish’ in English. I figured it meant eels. Sadly, there was no taste, like the cow lung. I think this was the result of the eels being so small to start with and then deep fried.

Pecel Solo

To wrap up, my lovely Balinese experience is over, and now I’m back to my regular school schedule. We’ll see what the next few weeks bring- final exams are coming up at the end of May so my days at SMKI will most likely be business-only for the rest of my time here. But can I really say that traditional Yogya dance classes are strictly business? Every day here feels average, but when I take the time to stop and think I’m always reminded of how luar biasa this experience is. Certainly out of the ordinary J

Hope to write again soon, there’s still more I have to catch you up on.

Sampai jumpa!