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.