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.