A Not-So-Strange Episode. Or Two.

Sometimes this little Bali jaunt really does feel like an episode straight from Fear and Loathing. Like when we have to flee Nusa Lembongan after a nasty altercation with the ferry tickets guy. Or when my teacher and I screech off as an old woman demands money from us. Or when, thwarted by bus schedules, I have to abandon a morning trip to Sanur and slink through the blissfully cool and empty streets of morning Ubud to regroup and lick my figurative wounds at Bali Buddha. But then again, it really isn't like anything the good doctor did in the American Southwest, and that's not just because I'm in the Indonesian Southeast.

Actually, I just did a little something I like to call "withholding information for dramatic effect," which is another way of taking my low-key adventures and making them sound vastly more exciting for you guys when in fact they were simply fun. From the top: Nusa Lembongan is a little island, still part of Bali, off the Southeast coast. Some of us went out on the oh-so-fun ferry (kind of rickety, but also great, especially when you ride on the roof)to relax on pristine beaches for a couple of days. Catch was, most of the people we met were in the tourism industry and therefore jaded towards all Westerners, even if we're nice students with a grasp of Bahasa trying to understand the culture. So they weren't so friendly, especially not this ferry tickets dude. The morning we were trying to head out, there was an exact change issue between us (plus a couple of Canadian friends we made- it's nice to meet pleasant travelers), and Marissa ended up being shorted 40,000 rupiah. It's four bucks American, but still not okay, so she asked for her change and the guy looked confused and gave her his money to count- exactly the amount he should have had. But it didn't make sense, so she persisted and he eventually gave in, but made us all feel bad. But why would he give in if he was really right? And what happened to the four 10,000 rupiah bills that we had paid him, not present in his wad of cash? And why didn't he show us what was in his pockets, nasty Bagginses? Victorious but rattled, we fled the island feeling righteous. First story down.

The second relates to work, but work is boring, but this is relevant: remember Nongan, the village that extracted blood tribute when I last visited? I returned on Thanksgiving to finish what I had started, namely interviewing people about active worship of Pan Balang Tamak, the trickster. I was driving with my teacher, Pak Yudi, and we had to turn around in the narrow country road. So he was backing into a driveway, but one of our wheels ended up in the little ditch by the side of the road. We hopped out, and a woman (whose driveway is was) came up and smiled and started saying no worries, we'll help. Then her grandson and husband came and pushed with me and the car popped right out. It was so easy I probably could have done it myself. But then the woman came up to me, no longer smiling, and started saying speaking in Balinese. I also heard "uang," which means money in Bahasa Indonesia, so I feigned ignorance and told her to talk with Pak Yudi. I hopped in and she came to the window and started in again, so Pak Yudi just waved and sped off into Nongan, laughing. I asked what was up, and he said that she was trying to ask for money (probably because I was a whitey), which was absurd. His rationale was that she shouldn't get used to being paid just to help a stranger in need, so he had decided to stylishly avoid the situation. It was a fun moment.

So that's two counts of us getting the better of avaricious people, something that delights me and makes all the other incidences of swindling a bit better. And those are the kinds of adventures I've been having (that word gets thrown around about five times a post)- business-related but still fun. On to the not-so-fun, I've realized that my time here has almost come to an end. Two weeks from Tuesday and I'll be on a plane heading home. Thoughts of home have sustained me through all the dark times (and the boring and even the not-dark times; I like daydreaming), but now I realize how hard it's going to be to leave this new way of life behind. We've all met some really cool people, and become a small, fifth-business-y part of this world. It's kind of cruel that study abroad has to end so soon. So that's some irony for you; I've gone full circle from relative indifference to dread to growing adaptation and excitement to now acceptance and actual regret that I'll be leaving. On the positive side, it's not like Bali's going anywhere (physically, yet), so I could always come back. And keep in touch with friends and family here. And be, you know, forevermore culturally sensitive and worldly and stuff. It's been real, but now I've got to start appreciating the end of the journey. And doing that work thing too; I'm technically still a student. But that sounds like a job for later.

So Much For ISP

Also entitled, why is there a marching band outside my internet cafe right now? Although that has nothing to do with the post at hand. So remember way back when, when I mentioned that I'd be off to magical-sounding Nongan to study the Balinese trickster archetype? Change of plans. My original plan was to go play in East Bali for a day on the beach, then head up and start studying, and be in Singaraja about now (up in the hot and dry north). But instead I got food poisoning from some bad warung food (presumably) and spend a day or two recovering from a sleepless and generally unrestful night. Okay, that's manageable. So two days late I head out to the far east, make the long drive up through the hills (covered in rice fields, as you might have guessed, but even more beautiful due to the alternating mountain and ocean views) to Nongan. Nongan isn't actually that rural, but it's pretty far away from everything. This becomes important later.

Things were building to be a nice little adventure: I was in a far place, my teacher had spoken with the head of the village, and he was going to let me stay in his house, and I was going to meet with a bunch of people about tricksters and religion the next day. Of course I was a bit nervous, what with all these strangers and being far away from the routine and not knowing what to do for my project, not to mention recovering from gastronomic distress, but that's all part of the routine. Everything was going to be fine. Catch was, the head of the village (kapala desa) couldn't feed me in his compound, so I had to go with some relation of his to get dinner at the night market. This was the first warning sign: I know I shouldn't be upset with him, but he was awkward, mumbled, spoke Bahasa with a vocab I'd never heard before, didn't really want to explain himself, and was generally off. Just a strange kid about my age who wasn't my favorite out of all the kids I'd met here. As these things work out, he was to be my transport, and I should have listened to my instinctual aversions this time.

Dinner was at a night market up the road, and we zipped up on his motorbike, as people do in a place where cars are a bit too expensive. I was feeling a bit off appetite-wise, but ate anyways to keep my energy up, and planned on going home and sleeping until morning. We got back on the bike and set off back home, five minutes down a sleepy country road into the gathering cool of dusk in the mountains. I was mentally debating the merits of something or other when I saw something coming up in the road. I registered it was a rock, a little bit larger than a brick. I had enough time to simultaneously think "Hmm, what's that?" and "Is he going over it?" Then we went right over it.

It was largely quiet as far as collisions go. I remember the feeling of the bike bucking under me, then an image of me, on my back, sliding down the road. Then another confused image of me in the ditch by the side of the road, pulling myself up. I also remember thinking "oh, this is actually happening," and trying to figure out how to stop moving. Then the sound came back on and people started materializing out of the dusk to ask if we were okay. The kid was rattled, but still fine and moving. Taking stock of my own wounds, I noticed that my left leg and elbows were scraped up. Thankfully I was wearing my helmet- natural caution and stern warnings from SIT left me impervious to the bemused skepticism of the Balinese, who didn't think I needed a helmet for such a short distance (the kid wasn't wearing a helmet, but seemed fine. I don't know how he managed). Then I asked someone to look at my back, which was stinging. This elicited a loud "oh my god," and they insisted I go to the hospital. The hospital proved to be a rickety building with blood on the floor from another patient in the waiting room, so I declined their offers of treatment and made further calls to make sure the cavalry was on the way. Then I had the pleasure of treating my own shock.

After a bit, as my wait would end up being a few hours, I went back to the head of the village's house, and waited with about thirty family members and friends, eventually letting them wipe my back with some antiseptic things from my huge first aid kid (more good foresight!) Then the cavalry showed, one of our teachers, Marissa and three of the girls for moral support. We zipped off to Denpasar, where I had the pleasure of getting all the road grit scrubbed out of my stinging wounds, and then enjoyed the benefits of codeine-based pain meds as I finally got to sleep.

So, exciting story but not much for ISP work. I spent the rest of the week recovering, and now I'm much more healthy: bandage off the vertical scrape on my back, leg and other minor scrapes healing. Finished the last of my antibiotics today, hopefully won't have to apply new bandages tomorrow. Healing is progressing rapidly, and I'll hopefully be able to enjoy full water immersion by the end of my time in Bali. But right now, I'm happy it wasn't much worse than it could have been, and am no longer fretting about ISP. After all, I've got a pretty legit excuse. Only downside is that my adventure is probably going to be a bit tame from here on out, but I'll still keep y'all posted if anything new happens. But that's about it for me.

No News 'Till Nongan

So it's been kind of a light couple of weeks for wild tales of life in Bali, but that's what happens when everything normalizes and you don't go on any big excursions. We did see a kind of cool performance on Halloween, a modern interpretation of lots of different art forms done for, as far as I could tell, the Balinese intellectual/artistic elite. Wild stuff.

And then I'll be off into the darkness of ISP, which is my independent study project, an SIT institution. I'll be off for the month of November, starting now, spending three weeks in the field (mostly on my own among the locals) studying and one week writing. It's not as hardcore as I make it out to be, but right now it seems intimidating. This is because I'll be studying Pan Balang Tamak, the Balinese trickster character, and an interesting figure in folklore because of the reactive nature of his tricks. I'll report more later, but the really cool part is that he's worshiped as a minor deity in certain villages. One of these is Nongan, a tiny village in the East of Bali, and a Bali Aga village (these are the dudes who resisted Javanese influence when they fled Java as Islam started to take over, and still kind of maintain their old traditions). They're supposed to kind of be a bit intense, and I get to attempt to stay with the head of the village for a little less than a week to question their religious practices. Cool. Between that and a journey around Bali, I'll probably be out of internet contact for a while. But on the plus side, I'll have interesting stuff to say upon my return.