The Top 5 Things I Will Not Miss:
1) Riding on a motorbike or the things that come with riding on a motorbike i.e. the bruised tailbone, shortened spine, bruised feet (when the path gets a little narrower than the driver realized and your foot goes under the tailpipe of another bike), or Kent yelling, "BUSH!" right before he drives through a piece of shrubbery.
2) Balinese drivers. Oh dear god. You can't even say that the Balinese shouldn't be given driver's licenses because as far as we could tell there is no actual Department of Motor Vehicles to give driver's licenses. I get that there are bad drivers everywhere. I even get that probably I am one of them. However, in Bali it is a entirely different realm of bad drivers. People drive cars as if they were motorbikes and they drive motorbikes as if they were cars. And if they happen to run you off the road and knock you off your motorbike while you are taking your son to school, they don't even apologize. In fact, they don't do anything - they don't move a muscle even when your husband is so angry he is yelling and cursing at them while you are so angry you can't even speak - you just want to cry. Also, in Bali, there's no insurance, so if they actually run you over or kill you, it's your bad karma coming to haunt you. I've ridden a push-bike in most the cities I've lived, and I don't know if I've had as many attempts on my life by other drivers as I had in Bali. When I got home, Kent would ask if I yelled obscenities at the other drivers, but I never did. I was too busy thanking God for my life.
3) Mosquitoes. Also won't miss mosquitoes, wasps, or bees the size of small birds.
4) Indonesian bathrooms:
a. I am not convinced of the superiority of the squat toilet. I hear the squatting position is better for giving birth and shitting, but I can't say I find it all that comfortable (for either task) so if it is better for you I don't care.
b. At first I loved the idea of the outdoor bathroom. I took pictures of our river rocked showers nestled in rock walls. I thought it would be romantic to take a bath and look up at the stars. It turns out there are several flaws to outdoor bathrooms even if they are beautiful; when it rains everything (towels, toilet, the clothes attempting to get dry) gets soaked. In some variations, the toilet gets doubly so by the rain falling as well as the accumulated water splashing off the roof (because for whatever reason the Balinese engineer who designed the bathroom didn't consider that when rain spilled over the roof it would drench the person who had the (undoubtedly karmic) misfortune to be sitting on the toilet while it rained. Outdoor bathrooms also tend to have mice and more mosquitoes - so that romantic bath under a night sky full of stars and the full moon isn't so romantic (unless you don't mind floating mosquito coils in your bath).
c. Because of the Muslim influence, most bathrooms have hoses next to the toilet. I never understood what exactly people do with those hoses, but whatever it is it leaves the entire bathroom soaking wet as if it just emerged from Noah's flood. Because my only footwear in Bali consisted of flip-flops, the soaking wet bathroom thing left me squeamish. Outings with my toilet training toddler became a miraculous feat as he may have told me he had to pee in time to get him to the toilet, but by the time I found a way to get the toilet seat dry or his clothes off without getting them wet from the floor, we had missed the opportunity. Ick.
5) Mold. I will not miss pulling a package of dry pasta out of the cupboard and finding it entirely covered in mold. I will not miss throwing my clothes in the hamper and having them mold by the time they get to the washer. I will not miss the moldy smell my clean clothes get when they just sit in the cupboard. I will not miss finding my child's toys covered with mold even though they have been sitting in the open air.
Alternates:
-The litter and the trash. This is the utterly heartbreaking thing about Bali. It is such a beautiful country with some of the most gorgeous scenery on the planet, but Indonesia doesn't have the infrastructure to manage trash removal or recycling programs. So people do like they've done for generations long before the introduction of plastic. When they just threw their banana leaf on the ground it was no big deal. Now that they have plastic, they treat it like their banana leaves, and sadly, it results in litter on the sides of roads, on sacred sites nestled in the mountains, in streams, and really just about everywhere you can imagine. Those that are "responsible" and do clean up their trash, burn it, which means they burn their plastics as well as their banana leaves and food scraps and they do so without a second thought about the smoke - or their children skipping around the fires. The health implications are a nightmare; we saw so many people (young and old) walking around with tumors and we could only imagine that they were the result of the environmental issues.
-Going without a car seat for Fyo. Not that we rode in a car often. But when we did with our toddler who just wanted to explore and practice shifting the gear shift, it was misery, because we could not just let him wander and explore the car. We had hold him still, and restraining an active toddler is never fun. I didn't think I would ever appreciate the car seat so much. (Though now that we've been back, we've learned that Fyo isn't the biggest fan of it. He's fine for short distances, but road trips aren't really in the cards for us at the moment.)
-One of the things we loved the most about Bali is how cheap things are, but one of the things that sucked is that because we are white and American and they assume wealthy (and even if we aren't we are by their standards) so often we paid (at least) double for things. Mostly, I don't mind paying what things are worth, but I get pissed when I get blatantly ripped off. On the side of the road, we could buy a litter bottle of water for 30 cents. When we got on the ferry not even a mile away, we assumed there would be some mark up because water is usually more expensive on modes of transportation and it was - locals had to pay the equivalent of 50 cents for a litter bottle of water. But when Kent wanted water, they charged him a dollar. Then laughed and talked about it and felt entitled in doing so. Never mind the mortar and pestle that locals could buy at the market for three dollars that I paid twenty-five dollars for.
The Top 5 Things I Will Miss
1. The cost of things. We have spent our first two weeks in the states in sticker shock. In Bali, we could add minutes to our phones for just a few dollars and it would last us the month. In Los Angeles, we wanted cell phones without having to get a one or two year plan since we have no idea where we're going to end up living. Kent spent half an hour staring at the list of options the man gave him - not because he thought the guy was trying to rip him off, but because the cost was so ridiculous for what they were offering and the cell phones companies make it so dang annoying to get a phone in the states. Or today I walked into Portland's New Seasons Market - one of the most beautiful grocery stores ever to grace the planet - for half and half, peanut butter, bacon and dog food. Fyo of course wanted his strawberries, grapes, I picked up a coffee, a few things for my grandmother whom we're staying with. I spent over a hundred dollars.
So we miss that about Bali, that we could order delivery and for less than five dollars, have two burritos delivered to the house. That I got my hair cut and colored and my eyebrows waxed for $28.00 (okay, I do admit my first haircut in Bali wasn't so good. But my second one is rather cute, and the color came out great.) That we had a part-time nanny for Fyo for $60 a month. Fyo's nursery school was seven dollars a day. (I really miss Fyo's school and I would give anything to find something of the same quality where ever we end up - or even in Portland with a similar drop-in policy for traveling famillies. I'd give even more to find something similar that didn't require him receiving financial aid to go there) I bought the most beautiful bag for $30.00. Oh, the list goes on. I'm a frugal girl. I like low cost of living.
2. Every week, we had ten coconuts and organic fresh vegetables delivered to our door. In the morning, we made smoothies with the coconut meat. We had a gardener who would daily whack open a coconut and put the coconut water in the fridge. I drank a coconut's worth of coconut water every day. Yum. And the eggplant too left me in heaven. Kent would saute slices of eggplant in olive oil, sprinkle salt on it and feta cheese. I could and would eat platefuls of it. Oh, I miss that.
3. I come from Portland, the micro brew capitol of the earth, and I'm not that much of a beer drinker, but for some reason (maybe because I was otherwise surrounded by shit beer) I developed an addiction to Bali's micro brew Storm. The Pale Ale. Just the smell of it is gorgeous. I ordered it whenever I saw it on the menu because it is a rarity. Once I even ordered it at eleven in the morning. Because I was addicted. It is so good.
4. We met such great people. When Kent and I moved to Colorado, then to Los Angeles, then to Singapore, each time it took us at least six months to settle in, make good friends and develop a community. In Bali, it took less than a month before we found friends that we absolutely adored. We do have a knack for always meeting great people, and our friends are always attractive, intelligent and funny people, and Bali was no exception. I wasn't in LA 24 hours before I missed our Bali friends.
5. The surprises in the details. Even when I said I was over Bali, I never got over the randomness or the element of surprise you come across in places like Bali. Whenever I left the house without our Nikon I was sorry. One night we left the grocery store. When we got to the main road, it was full of marching children carrying torches of fire for Indonesian Independence day. As far as the eye could see in both directions were children carrying torches. So we turned around and took the back roads home through the nesting place of the herons. It was nesting hour, so when you looked up, the sky was full of white iridescent wings spread wide. You couldn't see the leaves on the tree, there were so many birds. The trees were white with them. Another night driving home, we passed a cremation procession. We only saw it a split second, but the image of the deceased wrapped in a batik sarong and being carried to the burn site moved Kent and I in a way we had a hard time finding words for.
And I do miss the beauty of Bali. It feels good to be in the Pacific Northwest again; honestly, it feels nurturing in a way I can't explain (my family is predominantly Swedish and Scottish - I think I'm just hard wired to be North). I love the light of the West Coast. I love the air. I love the trees. Yet I can't help but miss some of the beauty of Bali. Despite being over it when I was over it, part of me still considers it one of our homes.
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