End Bali Communication

On our last day in Bali, we did a full spa day. In Ubud there are tons of spas, and they're wicked cheap. We chose Eve Spa and got a five hour package. This included free pickup from our hotel, then body massage, body scrub, a soak in a bath full of flower petals, facial, hair creme bath, manicure, pedicure, and also tea and a snack and lunch. All for under sixty bucks apiece. Insane. May be worth going again and just doing a week full of spa days, HA.

Here are a few pics of Eve Spa. Nice place.

The only issue with their thing is that we had to eat lunch in the lobby, at the coffee tables. It kind of undoes part of the massage if you have to lean over for 20 minutes while you eat.

Mom getting a creme bath, including scalp massage.

As a final note, Ubud also is a big producer of excellent wood carvings and furniture. Consequently, we encountered HI-larious signs such as these.

We made a couple purchases in shops like this one, which had room upon room, absolutely filled with intricate wood carvings. The shopkeep on this one showed us a wall piece that he said he'd just finished after a year of work on it. As if.

Kay, back to Japan now.

Time Out for Something Funny

Okay, so for my Business Communication class I give them a final project where they have to get groups together and pretend they are a company. They have to give a presentation trying to sell a product to the rest of the class, who are another company that wants to buy a new product that would be useful for their staff break room. So I explain what a break room is and give suggestions like refrigerator, microwave, tv, etc. Then they have to write down their group member names, company name, and two or three ideas for a product (in case two groups want to sell the same thing). This is what I get:

Group 1 ideas:

chicken tarte
supplement
fly bicycle

Group 2 ideas:

car (future car)

Group 3 ideas:

waterbed

Group 4 ideas:

confectionery company

It's like, when I talk in class, all they must hear is "wot wotwot wot wot shella shella wot wotwotwot" and when they read the simple-language handouts I give them, they must just be seeing OOOOOOO (^o^) (*^ｏ^*)(^∀^) (´;ω;｀)＼(^o^)／☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆(#^.^#)ｏ(^o^)ｏ.

End Bicycle Tour

Did I mention that bicycles are wicked scary? After we left the traditional Balinese home it became sort of okay, because we were often on nicely paved, but mostly deserted roads, but we also would come upon roads that were all busted up and bumpy and hilly, so I was often in a constant state of braking and gripping. And fear-sweating. It was exhausting.

But anyway, the scenery was nice, and a few times we stopped to take pictures of things like rice paddies, as evidenced by all the rice paddy photos.

It was a holiday called Galungan, question mark?, in Bali the day of our tour, so there were a bunch of decorations like these hanging around the streets.

I took this picture because it's not pretty.

There were also processions going down a lot of streets, with drumming and such, so sometimes we had to wait for traffic to clear up before we moved on.

My mom mentioned at one point to the tour guide that she really wanted a picture of someone carrying something on her head, because it's so exotic, I guess. So the first chance he got, he asked someone carrying something on her head if we could take her picture. But unluckily, this first person was a crotchety old woman, who didn't even dignify him with a verbal answer, just gave a curt yank of her head to the side and kept walking. The group of young girls below were happy to have their photo taken, though. They were acting like they felt like movie stars, getting stopped in the street. Isn't that special.

The tour included lunch as well as breakfast, so after a couple hours of biking, we stopped at some lunch restaurant, the kind with only three choices for food. Or at least, the menu for those of us on a tour had three choices. But again, nice scenery. The toilet was some raunchy-ass shit, though, I gotta tell ya. I should have brought my camera in there.

Also on the tour we saw a couple abandoned temples. The first one was abandoned apparently because of the big tree outside it. I guess it is considered to give luck to people in marriage or something if you pin something to it, and the tour guide said that eventually so many people came over there just t put stuff on the tree, that there were more people outside the temple than inside. So they packed up and moved elsewhere.

Tree.

Stuff.

Helmet.

Then we saw this place that's meant for VIPs. The tour guide said Obama went there. We did not get to go in there.

Inside this little tower I think there was an old dude playing Solitaire or something. I could be remembering this wrong, though.

The final stop on the tour was this temple, which is the oldest shrine in Bali, triple question mark??? It's been a month just about since this all happened, so the details are now fuzzy. Anyway, it's a big deal for some reason or other.

I'm pretty tired of writing about Bali now. I've done some other things in Japan since then, but I guess I'm a stickler for chronology. I guess next time will be the last Bali entry. Thank glob.