Indonesia: Last Consecutive Day in Seminyak, Bali (Day 5, Friday, 073109)

1. Have breakfast:



2. Make plans at a local travel agency to take a shuttle to Ubud, a speedboat to the Gilli Islands, and a flight to Yogyakarta.

3. Return to Callego for a sun salutations where the water meets the sand, a mango shake,



a honeydew juice, and the Mahi with spinach and mushroom garlic cream sauce

.

Eric has another one of them Bali Sunrises, which I read is comprised of arak/arrack, a sugarcane-based liquor, grenadine, and, I think, pineapple. It's purty:



4. Watch a beach employee in spiritual contemplation at the shrine on site, his hands chasing incense smoke.

5. Meet Eric's friend from one of the clubs, a Balinese host. I'm told (not having been clubbing myself, having taken a vow of abstinence from bars & alcohol), that employees are expected to be super cordial to clientele and serve as a sort of social lubricant; they know your name, snap, immediately, and it's in doing so that they maintain a constant flow of customers. Really, it's the Cheers ethos of "everybody knows your name." Adi tells me that the blossoms I've become obsessed with, are natively called the kamboge, their word for Cambodia. I find out later that the English name is frangipani, or plumeria:



Adi's from the jungles of Java, no university, but speaks French and English, and briefly went into baking with his mom during the '97 financial crisis. I also try to wring from him the admission that there are so many joints serving pizzas because the Balinese actually like pizza, but, no dice. His observation is that it's a tourist demand.

6. Also meet a horrific Liberian dude, which leads to a whole debacle of supposed "crying, puking, blisters" from "sunburn" as an excuse to not hang.

7. Find that one purchases gas at roadside dispensaries that sell petrol in Absolut vodka bottles. One USD for 2.

8. Dinner at a traditional padang, sort of an extension of Indonesian food customs, which entail cooking all the dishes in the morning, and then setting them out, luke-warm, for family members to pick at throughout the day. I'll go into this some more when I write in more depth about the local food. At any rate, I order by pointing at the dishes, all encased inside a glass counter, and we have (again, room temperature):



beef rendang, mixed sauteed vegetables, a spicy, shredded chicken salad, tempe, fried chicken, corn fritters, white rice, on a banana leaf. None of it particularly impressive.

9. But sunset, earlier, was: