1) I’m in the process of losing theflattestcat.com probably (long story below), so if you visit and the site is down, go to theflattestcat.ca which I’m in the process of setting up (new design coming as well).

2) Been having a few issues uploading to Flickr from the work connection here so you might have to wait a bit to see all the photos I’ve taken lately.

3) Updates are going to be a little bit less stagnant as I’ve decided to forego internet in my new pad since the guy whose internet it is has decided to charge me almost 2x what the previous tenant was paying. So now I’m writing the posts at home on my downtime and then uploading them to my server when I get into PT Bambu in the mornings or evenings after work. Anyway, been an eventful couple of weeks so I’ll try to remember as much as possible.

The last time I wrote about the bike trip I believe which was pretty awesome. The sky was pretty overcast most of the day so most of my pictures didn’t turn out very spectacular, but you can go to my Flickr to see them anyway. Even though it was cloudy it sure didn’t stop me from getting a decent burn on my arms/face. I’m starting to get the worst damn farmer’s tan already. I think I’m going to have to make sure to spend some time implementing some beach action with heavy arm/leg/face sunscreen so my chest and back can catchup. But we’ll see, it’s not like I’m going to have my shirt off much come January back in Vancouver.

Anyway, most of last week was spent running around getting things in order to move into the new place, paying deposits, finding my way, eating in Ubud, etc. I didn’t manage to get much work done as it seemed there was always something inconsequential going on in the evenings that I had to attend to. I moved into the new pad on Thursday night last week. I can’t tell you how fantastically amazing it is to have air conditioning in my bedroom. I actually spend the night sleeping now instead of constantly switching to the opposite side of the bed/body because lying on back made the other side of the bed super sweat-soaked and uncomfortable. Now, I should probably point out that as horrible as it sounds, I definitely could’ve made it there for 3 months if I had/wanted to. The thing about Bali though is that it’s verrrry cheap to rent here, the place you see in the photos below is costing me 3 million rupiah/month which is roughly $330 canadian. Additionally, I was finding it extremely hard to find my rhythm in the yurt. The bathrooms by my yurt weren’t done (finished the day I moved out -_-) while I was there, so I ended up having to walk halfway across the camp to go to the washroom, shower (the one by my yurt was kinda uncomfortable and had no lights so it was a pain to shower in the evenings, which was normally when I was showering), or brush my teeth. Overall it was a really interesting and humbling experience but I just couldn’t find any kind of focus or rhythm there so it was causing me a lot of problems. However, back to the stories and stuff.

On Thursday of last week I went out with Eko (works for PT Bambu) to see the forests where they harvest the bamboo and take some photos for the website (potentially). We ended up driving a lot further than I thought we were going to and I ended up way out in the boons. It was pretty obvious the locals weren’t used to seeing foreigners out that way. It took us a little longer to get out to the harvest area because the rain wasn’t co-operating and neither of us had brought our rain gear. Once the rain stopped we ended up running into a huge traffic jam just north of Ubud. There was a van who had obviously backed out into the wrong lane and was trying to get into the proper lane so that he could take off but traffic had closed in on both sides of him which ended up blocking everything up. I found it moderately amusing that the first thing that came into my head was “$5 it’s a white boy”. I’ve only been here a little over a month and I’m starting to get annoyed by the gringos not knowing their way around, hah. Anyway, once we finally made it out to the cut spot, Eko took me down here:

(this is on the way back up, it looks/is a lot worse coming down)

I, of course, had no clean clothes but whites left so I ended up re-ruining the white pants I got all muddy a couple weeks ago playing soccer with the kids. Not a big deal though. The walk Eko took me on was amazing. It’s totally astounding and slightly eerie (and hard) to get completely away from civilization anymore. There was nothing there but jungle, water, and mud. After he showed me around their current cut spots, he took me down to a spot where they cut about 6 months ago to show me some of the new shoots sprouting up.The bamboo shoots are even more beautiful than the full-grown bamboo in my opinion:

Eko is extremely passionate about bamboo and I learned a great deal from him about this amazing grass. Overall it was a very humbling and interesting experience.

On Friday afternoon, I went down to Starducks (tiny, local warung that we get coffee/coka colas on our lunch break at… they have a number of rather large ducks that are always wandering around, hence the name) with Marni and Kendra to see an impromptu show by a traditional Javanese band. Me, Marni and Kendra ended up being treated to personal lessons by the musicians on one of the Javanese instruments (can’t remember what it’s called unfortunately, but its made out of bamboo and works like a mouth harp).

You smack the end that I’m not holding with a finger from your other hand and simply breathe through it. It uses your mouth as a cavern to kinda echo the sound out or something. It sounds easy, but it’s actually a little bit difficult to get a decent rhythm and feel to it. Thankfully, the Javanese gave each of us one of these bamboo mouth harps to take home and practice with (yay souvenirs!). It was an extremely interesting way to end the week off.

There was a whole bunch of my friends doing things here on Friday night but I decided to just take it easy, relax in the new pad and do some work. It turned out to be an exceptionally inspirational night and I managed to accomplish a lot of great things (intentionally vague, you’ll see what I cooked up in the next couple months). Saturday was spent also just kinda chilling. I met up with Jared for lunch at Kafe (super Westernized restaurant with amazing breakfast… you feel like you’re in downtown Vancouver or something with the coffee shop atmosphere and free internet). I dealt with some client stuff in the afternoon before I hung out with Abee (fellow Vancouverite who graduated from UBC) for a bit and we discussed the website I’m helping her with for the non-profit she’s starting up in the Philippines (her home country). She left around 9pm to go into Seminyak to see a band and meet up with some of our other friends while I decided to just chill and catch up on some e-mails and things before calling it an early night.

Sunday I spent just running some errands and getting settled into my new pad again. I received some pretty bad news from home Sunday morning when I got up that shook me up pretty bad (particularly because I couldn’t be there to support my family) so I spent most of the early afternoon just journalling about everything going on and trying to sort myself out. This led to a really weird tangent of inspiration in relation to my spark on Friday that drove me for another couple hours of straight writing and conceptualizing some more things. I can’t really explain too much further as I’m trying to still sort some of it out and develop a plan of execution, but rest assured there will be more information coming down the pipe soon. Oh, and obligatory new pad photos:

Also, this is the tiny-ass little path that I have to drive my bike down to get to my place (my gate is the one you see at the end of the path:

Monday night I borrowed Chakra’s bike (Green School’s permaculturalist) to bring the rest of my suitcase and possessions over from the yurt because he’s got a trailer attached to it. Now, the amusing part of this story is that, apparently, the Balinese believe that trailers are a symbol of being poor. Why, I have no idea, but trailer = poor in Bali. So, needless to say, seeing a white boy (which = wealthy in their mind) driving a scooter with a trailer attached to the bike was mildly mind-blowing to them. I’m not really cognizant of the locals staring at me (doesn’t really happen that much for the most part although it’s not non-existant) because they’re pretty used to seeing us whiteys around Ubud. Slap a trailer on the back of your bike though and boy do you get people staring at you. I actually had one guy POINT at me in disbelief. It was an utterly bizarre but still funny/interesting experience.

Tuesday I met up with Campbell and Ben (two Aussie architects at PT Bambu) for some pizza and beer at Pizza Bagus. We ended up running into a few other friends there from Green School who had just finished a class in Bhasa (Indonesian) around the corner. It ended up being a good end to the day with some decent food, beers and great conversation.

Wednesday night I ended up staying around at PT Bambu late because Green School was hosting a full moon Mepantigan event. Mepantigan is a really interesting traditional Balinese dancing/fighting/fire-breathing performance show. I, unfortunately, totally forgot my camera in Marni’s car so I don’t have any pictures this time to show you guys. I’ll try to steal some pictures from one of my friends that were there for it and, if not, there’ll be another full moon in December that I’ll make sure ot take pictures at. Overall though it was an extremely visual and interesting performance. I can’t really explain better without pictures so look forward to those in a few weeks. Additionally, the Javanese band I mentioned above did an additional performance after the Mepantigan show that was really breath-taking. I’m going to try and find out if they have a cd because it was so awesome. After the Mepantigan show me, Kendra, Marni, and Ben went to a restaurant in Ubud for some late dinner. Following dinner me and Ben proceeded to head back to our residences (he’s living just down the street), upon which I found out I had a flat tire, again. I had asked the rental guy last week to fix the tire because it had been flat. He seemed to imply that he had fixed it but his English isn’t very good and just… yeah. I dunno, moderately annoying but whatever.

Anyway, I took today off from PT Bambu to deal with this and deal with some errands which included picking up my laundry and getting my hair cut. The laundry went fine, the hair cut, not so much. I had brought my clippers with me from Van so that I could cut my own hair while I was down here but they must have got smashed by baggage handling somewhere along the way because they weren’t working when I pulled them out of my suitcase. They kinda just sit there humming while the blade vibrates in the same spot. Anyway, I went to this place just down the street to get my hair cut… everything started out fine. She took out her clippers, started buzzing the mop I had started to acquire on my head down to something a little more reasonable and manageable. Once she got around to the front-side of my head though, she decided that she should buzz my right-sideburn clean up to inline with the top of my ear. Of course, she did it before I had a chance to correct her, so I’m now side-burnless for the first time in several years. Additionally, after thinking she understood I wanted to keep the small puff of hair on my chin (forget the proper ‘term’), she buzzed it clean off right at the middle of my chin. I felt like the kid in those awful America’s Funniest Home Videos whose dad accidentally buzzed a large patch into the top of his head and consequently has to shave the kid’s hair right off to keep him from looking like a moron. After this she asked me if I wanted a shave, figuring that maybe she could redeem herself I let her. Worst. Idea. Ever.

It’s pretty apparent that this lady has never ever in her life actually had to shave anything on her body before. Far and away one of the most unenjoyable experiences of my life. I’m pretty sure the blade was dull to begin with (it also looked like the first generation ever of single blade dispoable Gillette razors). Then she proceeded to put AS LITTLE SHAVING FOAM AS HUMANLY POSSIBLE on my skin (I had to repeatedly tell her to put more on as she had removed all the foam she had put on and was still attacking my poor skin with this stupid pre-my mom’s birth gillette blade). This also coincided with her attempting to shave my face in every direction but the one in which the grain flows (sideways across the mustache anyone?). Additionally, she kept pushing my head back as far as it could possibly stretch to shave under my chin (my neck was literally hurting). I don’t care what you say, a yellow roof gets pretty boring after 30 seconds, no matter where you are in the world. I, obviously looking back on it, should’ve stopped her and walked out but I felt rude and didn’t know how to explain to this lady who barely spoke English that she gave me enough razor burn to last a life time.

So, to offset this absolutely horrid experience, I proceeded to walk down the street and get an hour-long massage for 50 000 rupiah (~$5 canadian). Booyah!

That’s it for now, so remember if you come back and the site is down to head over to theflattestcat.ca (same domain name as this, just .ca instead of .com) because I’ll be re-starting on there. Essentially, theflattestcat.com is on an account that I get notification from but have no way of gaining access to so I can’t renew the stupid domain which just expired. It works out well though as I’ve been meaning to re-design this website and I have these other projects from above that I’m looking to startup so it’ll be a huge re-launch together. It may mean however that there may not be anymore updates about Bali on the website until I get all the projects ready. We’ll see though.

Anyway, there’s been clouds rolling around here all afternoon/evening and when I left to go to Ubud to drop off this deposit after work it started pouring rain, which was, you know… fantastic. Thankfully, I have my uber rain jacket down here that my Dad gave me a few years ago. I may still go and get a poncho as this jacket doesn’t cover my legs, but it does the job for now. The whole point to this part of the post is simply setting the stage for one of the most incredible drives I’ve had. After dropping off the deposit and having dinner at Warung Mendez (near my new place; excellent, large plate of food + a huge glass of fresh juice for 24 000 rupiah, which is like… $3 canadian? unreal), I hopped back on my scooter and headed back to camp.

Since I’ve started to get pretty familiar with the roads from camp to Ubud and all of the major landmarks (like Bintang Grocery where I go to get my fix of white people foods) I’ve taken to doing a little more exploring and finding the fastest ways around. I decided to take a back-road way to camp because it’s a little bit faster and you get to drive through some vast expanses of rice fields on the way. I’m so glad I did.

I was practically alone on the road with rice-fields stretching out around me in every direction. Above me: dark grey clouds, rolling in every direction. They flash to life every few seconds as they’re illuminated by bolts of lightning dancing and forking from cloud to cloud. The fields around me spring to life in the light-grey wash of every lightning strike; the newly planted crops of rice reflect back the sky’s angry face from the depths of their tiered pools. The continuous dance of life.

Absolutely surreal.

Anyway, this has been an all-around stellar day. I showed up for lunch in the kitchen today and seen a rather tall, dark-aired man eating lunch with John Hardy who looked remarkably like Stefan Sagmeister (he’s one of most internationally renowned contemporary graphic designers). I couldn’t stop staring at him because, from the angle I was at, he looked remarkably like, well… who he is. John Hardy was talking to him about all the things they’re doing here at PT Bambu and the Green School though so I didn’t really have much of an opportunity to say anything or ask him if he was who I thought he was. It was tearing me up inside. Eventually, he spoke up and I knew instantly that it was him. It’s kinda hard to mistake that accent. There was little time to talk as him and John Hardy were having a pretty in-depth conversation, however I did managed to squeak out an “I’m Dave. It’s an honor to meet you” when he introduced himself. It was really bizarre, I felt as giddy as a schoolgirl. Apparently he’s down in Bali for about a year and they’re going to try to possibly get him to do something with the school so hopefully it won’t be the last time I see him. Maybe next time I’ll be able to manage more than a few words, heh.

Another totally surreal moment. I’m pretty sure Stefan Sagmeister is the last person I would’ve ever imagined meeting in Bali, but I guess such is life’s little twists of irony and amusement.

Anyway, Friday (Halloween) I went out partying at Abee & Dagmara’s place in Ubud with a number of friends from here at the school. I spent Saturday running around getting completely lost and then found again in and around Ubud before I met up with Abee and Jared to chill for a bit before we caught a late dinner at a little warung in downtown Ubud.

I woke up first thing Sunday for our bike trip to northern Bali that Glenn had arranged for us. The tour company picked us up at 7:45am at the Green School campus. From there we were driven for about an hour to northern Bali where we were served breakfast overlooking a stunning set of rice paddies that were constructed into the side of the mountain. We then piled back into the vehicle and drove about another twenty minutes to the drop off point. From here we each grabbed a bicycle and a helmet and took off on our trip, following our guide. The trip was pretty good overall. We spent the entire time (roughly 3 hours) riding through tiny back-country roads with little-to-no traffic, getting to see gorgeous rice patties and tiny little Balinese communities. At one of the stops we learned all about the housing structures of traditional Balinese culture as well as how the local liquor Arak is made. My apologies as I haven’t had a chance to download the pictures from my camera yet and I’m feeling too lazy to download them right now. Keep an eye on my Flickr and I’ll toss them on there sometime this week.

It was off and on cloudy/rainy during the bike ride so I didn’t think it was necessary for me to put on any sunscreen. That was definitely a stupid idea. I ended up getting burned on my neck/face/arms well enough that I had to go get aloe moisturizing lotion from Bintang last night to ease the throbbing heat. Silly white boy.

Anyway, that’s about it for now. I know I didn’t write about week 4 but there honestly wasn’t too much to tell. I got a new key for my scooter, went out partying with some friends on the weekend and that was pretty much it.

Oh, and I went to Kafe for dinner a few times. They have amazing food. And wireless internet. It feels like I could be chilling in downtown Vancouver if it wasn’t for the giant line of scooters in front of the patio. And… you know… the heat.

That’s about it for now. The week 6 summary will have details and pictures about the new pad I’m moving into on Wednesday. So very, very stoked for it.

Enter tangent. I never really thought about ants too much before I got here, but when they’re constantly crawling in and out of your keyboard, across your screen, or under your arms, it’s kinda hard to miss them. And they are quite plentiful around these parts. Microscopic ants, small ants, medium ants, big ants. You got everything in the form of ant here. Anyway, after killing a couple of large spiders (think I mentioned that in my last post?) and not having the energy or will to touch something 5 inches in diameter that is that ugly and… spidery, I left the hairybastards on the floor. The ants cleaned up the entire mess in less than 3 full days. I was rather impressed.

Speaking of which, I should check to see if that beetle is gone yet. Dramatic pause for effect. About 35% or so consumed, I’d say. The beetle had a significant mass advantage over the spiders though, so I guess that’s to be expected. Plus, this isn’t like, the big ants that are on cleanup duty. It’s the little ones almost too small to see. So yeah, I’ve taken up the hobby of feeding the ants in my yurt because I’m too much of a wuss to pick up the carcasses and throw them outside. But hell, the damn ants are already there, they might as well do me a favour.

Anyway, I’ve typed 500 words already on feeding giant beetles to ants. My point before I diverged on my tangent was this: I dunno about you, but when coming face-to-face with a humming beetle, I instantly thought about collecting a large number of these things in a small room, tossing in some microphones and trying to train them to create some sort of freestyle jazz humming thang. But maybe that’s just me. Who knows. On to the rest of the week!

Most of the week, barring my introduction to the local insect species (also found a rather large grasshopper later in the week who I also fed to the ants), has been fairly mild during the weekdays. I’ve had a lot of work from civilization that I’ve been trying to catch up on and deal with so that I can pay down credit cards and debt while I’m living for so cheap (pretty good idea considering the state of the global economy I think). $160 Canadian nets you about 1.25 million Indonesian Rupiahs so I can live pretty well on much less than I was paying simply for rent in Vancouver, let alone everything else. So my evenings have been spent taking it easy for the most part, cooking some food in the kitchen in the camp and then working on client stuff. Quite enjoying it, very nice pace here.

So I knew I had a big day Saturday and basically just took it easy Friday. Now comes the fun part.

I got up at a normal time (re: 7:30 am… it’s hard to ignore the sounds of the jungle by this time) and proceeded to spend about 45 minutes chatting to my mom on Skype. Got dressed, brushed my teeth and headed out to meet up with Dagmara and Abee (both have lived/studied in Vancouver before so we have a common bond there). Daga needed me to pick up her passport from our work because she was flying out first thing Sunday to Jakarta for a business trip, so I decided to stop for some gas on my way. Turns out that even the big gas stations here in Bali, with the big fancy signage and all, don’t have ATM machines for you to take out cash at. Silly me. Of course I had neither any of my Canadian money on me nor the 21000 rupiah it cost me to fill the tank on my scooter and there wasn’t a damn atm anywhere nearby. I ended up having to call Sara from the camp to come and lend me some money because I couldn’t leave without paying and there was no ATMs anywhere nearby.

So I went straight to Daga & Abee’s place for breakfast now since they were ready to eat and it would’ve taken me a while to get to the school and get the passport and everything. Once I got to their place we made some really wicked french toast with honey on it, some eggs, and some store-bought mango juice. Delicious.

After breakfast we packed our bags and scooters up and headed out to the beach. We were, however, going to Pedang Pedang Beach, which is, respectively, far away. Not to mention we hit the bypasses and go straight the middle of Denpasar/Kuta (major population/tourist spots), so I was introduced completely to the beauty (re: nightmare) that is the traffic in this area. Something you should understand about traffic in Bali is there’s a lot of bikes, some normal personal vehicles, taxis, and a buncha trucks and buses. There is very few lights and I mean VERY few lights. Only at the major intersections of the largest bypasses are there lights. Lane markings are like… advice. We know you’re not really going to listen, but this is the sorta area you should be travelling in. It’s not uncommon to see bikes on the far side of their respective lanes with passenger vehicles driving right through the middle of a two lane (one in each direction) highway. People tend to be very courteous drivers, making way for each other, slow down, etc. to let people on their way, but it still gives a very new definition to defensive driving here. You basically keep your eyes on what’s in front and if presented the opportunity you shoulder check when you’re moving in one direction or another.

Anyway, we stopped on our way to Pedang Pedang at the Dunkin’ Donuts in Sanur for a drink, put on some sunscreen as I was already getting burned just driving around on my bike and continued on. We stopped at a McDonald’s in Nusa Dua (I think that’s what it was called anyway) to grab an ice cream and meet up with Kendra before we continued on to our last leg of the journey. Turns out that we actually spent more time driving to the beach than we actually spent there. We arrived around 4pm just as the tide was starting to go out, got a little bit of swimming and sunning in (being so equatorial it’s pretty much 6am-6pm for the sun) and then headed out again to get some food.

Me, Abee, Dagmara and Kendra went to a really great cafe in Sanur for supper. I really wish I could remember the name of the place because the food was awesome and they had a live band singing that was awesome. They were playing a nice mix of blues, tribal and salsa stuff, it was a nice complement to the food and wine.

After dinner we parted ways with Kendra and I followed Abee and Dagmara back towards Ubud. Part of the way we parted ways again as the camp is about 20 minutes away from Ubud and it would be a waste of gas to follow them all the way there. Now this is when the story gets… fun.

Turns out that sometime between the time we left the dinner place in Sanur and the time that I arrived home my ignition key broke off. Said ignition key also contained the ring on which my key to the padlock on my yurt that’s meant to keep people out. That includes said resident of yurt when said resident does not have the key. It was now around 10pm at night, dark as it can be and I’m locked out of my home away from home. After one of the other camp residents helped me try and pry one of the rings off the door to no avail, I had to trudge all the way across the campus to talk to Pak Yoman who apparently has the grinder. Pak Yoman and his family decided to go away for the weekend though. I promptly ran into the campus security just outside of Pak Yoman’s place and started chatting to them to find a way to get the lock off. About 20 minutes later I was back at my yurt with a couple of security guards and what seemed like a pair of workers or something, watching them take a grinder to one of the iron rings on my yurt to release my bed from the permanent jail of the keyless padlock. Everything worked out fine in the end, but I definitely wasn’t in the mood for that to happen after spending a solid 6 or 7 hours driving around on a scooter and feeling my arms and legs throbbing slightly from the sunburn that was starting to soak through my skin.

That being said, it’s pretty hard for it to really bother you after spending your day here:

Anyway, this week was fairly uneventful for the most part. My weekdays were spent working on the website for PT Bambu and my evenings were spent grinding through some projects that I acquired before I found out about this trip.

Friday night I left the camp with Daniel and headed out to Ubud on our scooters to meet up with a number of people from school. We went to this tiny little restaurant called Devilicious that turned out to have some pretty awesome food, nice mixture of Western style cuisine and traditional Bali/Indonesian food. Just as our group was finishing up our final meals the night monsoons decided to hit. With only a few of us having actual rain ponchos we ended up packing it inside to the restaurant to hang out until the rain ended. We sat and had a few drinks and chilled with the owners until at about 1:30am the rains finally cleared. The group then packed it onto our bikes and headed over to Daga’s place where a select few of us continued to drink till a short while after the sun came up. In addition to this I was introduced to the local liquor, also known as Arak. It’s basically home-brewed liquor that you can buy for super cheap all over the place. Since its homemade, everyone’s arak is different. I’ll say this, I was not very impressed with my first introduction. Even mixed with coke the smell was still horrid and the taste wasn’t much better. Apparently you can get better stuff not too far from the camp, according to Daniel, so hopefully I’ll get to try that one sometime. Although, if I don’t, I don’t think I’ll be too sad about it.

Saturday was spent just chilling and napping after only sleeping for a few hours at Dagmara’s place before driving back to the camp. Got a fair amount of work done Saturday night which was good as I’ve not been getting nearly enough done in my evenings as of late. Sunday I chilled and worked most of the afternoon until I went over to Brad’s home (the Director of the Green School) for a nice dinner as a ‘welcome’ for all of the new interns and teachers.

I can’t believe that it’s only been a little over two weeks that I’ve been here. It feels like I’ve been here for two months already. Anyway, going to go get into some more work before I crash for the evening. I hope everyone is having a great thanksgiving weekend (craving turkey so bad!) and I hope I’ll have more stories for you at the end of this week.

So I landed on Saturday about half an hour after my expected landing (noon) time due to some minor technical concerns when we were leaving Singapore that the pilots wanted to make sure to fix before we took off. Abbie (one of the interns here who actually graduated from UBC) met me at the airport with a driver and in a flash I was packed up and on the road driving through Denpasar. Me and Abbie had a great chat on the way to the campus and I think it definitely helped that we were both recently from Vancouver. She took me over to PT Bambu, which is where I’ll be interning while I’m down here, and introduced me to Aldo and Josie. We then headed around to the other side of the Green School campus where the interns and some of the teachers are staying, as well as me.

Once we got to the other side I piled my backpack and my suitcase into my Yurt and met some of the other interns and teachers (Caitlyn, Leia, Sara, Ivan and Daniel) here at the campus. From there it was decided that we should go into Carrefour (think Wal-Mart) to pick up some supplies for the coming week. I was still pretty jet-lagged/sleep-deprived/overwhelmed with ACTUALLY BEING IN BALI so I didn’t really buy anything (realized since that there was a number of things I should’ve bought while I was there, but, oh well, lesson learned). I think Carrefour itself helped in the overwhelming of me, this place is ridiculously huge. HUGE. Apparently I was “spoiled” because Carrefour is a very non-Bali (re: Western) thing and here I was finding out about it on my first day in town, but, oh well. I’m really glad to know its there if I need it. Anyway, once everyone was done shopping we piled back into the van and the driver took us back to the campus village. It was in and around 8pm so I sent off a quick e-mail to let my parents know I arrived safe and sound and proceeded to pass out for ~12hrs.

The next day I met Ingrid when I got up who promptly invited me to go to the beach with her and a few of the other teachers/interns whom I hadn’t met yet. The beach we went to (Geger Beach) was absolutely breath-taking. Fine, white sand beaches and beautiful blue-green water as far as the eye could see with waves nuzzling along the horizon line before crashing upon a reef about 200 m out from the beach. Absolutely surreal. There was a small restaurant at the beach where I had a pineapple and honey pancake for lunch. I expected that ordering it I would’ve gotten like… 3 or 4 pancakes as is typical for Western-style restaurants. However, as I soon found out, pancake means one. Not two. Not three. One. Apparently the lack of an “s” was intentional. Oops. I also had a fresh pineapple juice which was amazing. The fruit here is absolutely unreal.

After the beach we went back to the Green School campus where they were having burgers and some beer for the teachers for supper to welcome a new teacher to the school. I checked out a little bit early as I was still feeling jet-lagged and I’d developed a headache from a little too much sun and not enough water, at least I think that’s what it was. Regardless, went and passed out early again.

Woke up Monday morning, had some breakfast with Ingrid and headed off to PT Bambu to get started on my work and meet everyone else I’m supposed to be meeting. For the most part the rest of the week was pretty eventless. I kinda just focused on getting settled into my new lifestyle here, learning my way around campus, etc. Tried to catch up on some of my freelance work from North America and just try and find my groove here.

On Wednesday I got a scooter rental (only $40/month including insurance) and followed Ben (one of the office guys at Green School) into Ubud so that I could pickup some groceries for the rest of the week. It took me a little bit of time getting used to the scooter, which included breaking one of my sandals and taking a small chunk out of the big toe on my left foot, but otherwise it was a fairly painless process. I’m going to leave discussion about the traffic and people’s driving habits here out of this post because this is already getting to be a bit long and I want to save it for another post where I have pictures to compliment the rather lengthy bit of content that that post will be.

The rest of the week was pretty quiet as Wednesday/Thursday were holidays and the school was closed on the Friday as well. It was nice though, it gave me a chance to get a little more settled into my new life here and catch up on some work.

Me, Sara and Ivan all headed into Ubud again this afternoon (Sunday) to pickup some groceries and then we came back to chill out for the evening. I made sure to buy bread, cheese slices and butter at Bintang (grocery store) so that I could kill this grilled cheese craving I’d been having since sometime Thursday. It’s amazing how much psychological comfort some of the most basic foods can bring you when you’re being dropped into completely new circumstances.

Overall I haven’t actually been receiving too much culture shock so far or getting too freaked out about everything. I don’t know if it’s because I completely over-thought it before I came or knowing that I have so many close friends and family a few bytes away but I’m adjusting much better than I thought I was going to. I haven’t really felt lonely or even out of place yet. I think the fact that I’m doing something I normally do (web design) is helping in the transition. If I was getting dropped into this situation to do something I’d never done before, like teaching English to Korean kids (sorry Marsha), I’d probably have found it a lot harder to adjust to. As it stands, I’m just doing what I always do, just in slightly different circumstances. Okay, dramatically different circumstances. But I have shelter, food, and a connection to those most important to me (Facebook/Skype). I’m not sure what else I really could need. And that, in the end, may be one of the most important things I’m going to learn from this entire experience.

What the HELL went wrong with Apple’s production line on the iPod Classics? I bought my 160gb iPod Classic back in February to use as an additional external hard drive (in addition to its more generic uses like playing music obviously). By mid-March the Hold button on the top of the stupid thing had broke. So I took it in in late April to get it fixed under warranty (I was slammed with school before and didn’t have a chance before that), they ended up just replacing it on the spot with another 160gb version (yay Apple!). So it got replaced at the beginning of May, I spent most of May and June chilling in my apartment working which means that I didn’t have to worry about using the iPod because I was at my computer. July and August I spent most of the time on the road between Calgary, Edmonton, Pemberton and Vancouver so it never got used then because the Vee-Dub comes with an mp3 cd deck. So back into September, it got used a fair amount while I was running around packing up my entire life into a storage locker and preparing for this trip to Bali, still not THAT much though, maybe 4 or 5 hours a day for a few weeks?

Sometime between the time I arrived at the Vancouver airport and the time that I landed in Bali involved my essentially BRAND NEW iPod deciding that it didn’t feel like holding a charge. Ever. I’ve left the thing plugged in for an entire day while I’ve been at my comptuer working and not once did the stupid thing ever manage to take a charge (EVEN THOUGH IT SAYS ITS CHARGING). The worst part of all is that the stupid thing is so damned low on batteries that my computer won’t even recognize it when I plug it in, which means that I can’t even pull off my favoritest music to play from my harddrive until I get back to civilization to get it fixed.

There’s a Mac authorized dealer somewhere in Denpasar (an hour or so drive) that I may try to get it fixed at but… I’m so infuriated right now with this that I’m tempted to just try and get my money back from Apple. Utterly ridiculous. I know people with Gen 1 iPods that still work better than their new lines. I wish they’d stop chasing the bottom dollar and work on improving the toughness of their machines. Thankfully their laptops don’t seem to suffer from the same poor materials, but I guess I probably just jinxed myself.

I think one of the things I’ve been noticing the most since I got here (outside of the crazy traffic - but that’s for another post when I have pictures) is the handshakes. They’re soft. I know that a handshake isn’t traditional in asian cultures and that the people I’m meeting here are, for the most part, doing it out of courtesy to the new Westerner. Its just kinda weirded me out a bit. Or maybe not so much weirded me out, as left me pondering. I don’t know if it’s just because I’m so used to dealing with Western businessmen from the last few years freelancing…. but I’m just really used to a firm handshake. I expect it. When I get a soft handshake now my mind explodes with the over-analysis of that person’s character, self-esteem issues, work habits, trustworthiness, etc. Its kinda weird. The Handshake is making me think about the implications it has on East/West business relationships as well as the psychological implications it has in regards to the Blink factor.

Anyway, I know The Handshake is not a part of the culture here. I know they don’t understand the implications of The Handshake… it’s just one of those things I noticed myself noticing and thought I’d mention it. I’m planning on trying to put down as many things as I possibly can on this blog that I’m noticing here in the East before I get too adjusted to the culture… so there may be some more random posts like this to come.

Been meeting an absolute ton of people out here over the last couple days and actually spent my first full day in Bali on the beach (how wicked is that?). This is actually about an hour and a half drive away from where I’m staying on the campus, which is kind of unfortunate because I almost didn’t want to leave once we were there. It’s called Geger Beach and is, I believe, south-west past Kuta (major tourist destination).