Bali... You gotta love it.
The first time I visited the Island, I was in an emotional wasteland, having just cashed in a plane ticket four days earlier for Turkey, where I was on my way to visit my cheating boyfriend. Suspicions confirmed, plans drastically changed, I stepped over my suitcase packed with winter clothes, romantic accessories and presents for the whole family, grabbed my grubby back pack and filled it with whatever I thought I needed for summer in Bali. I packed in a daze, as was obvious when I opened my bags in Ubud and found such items as four sticks of deoderant, some old photographs of friends I had long lost touch with, and all of my Chinese textbooks. All of them. What was I thinking?
Arriving in Ubud the second time, It was easy to see how things had changed. My head space was stronger. Clearer. I gave myself kudos for light luggage and packing nothing I didn't need. Including baggage of unworthy boys.
I spent most of my days hanging around the "Kafe", chatting with people, drinking coffee, sucking up the newspapers not available in Shanghai, practicing yoga. I read news about China that put sand in my blood. What am I doing in China? Am I really enjoying life in Shanghai? Where is my life exactly going? The more I talked about Shanghai and my life there, I realised that I was no spokesperson for TourismChina.
On a nice sunny day, I decided to go to a local spa that had a pool. On the way, a British man in a baseball cap and khaki shorts asked me some typical question you might hear from a tourist. I remember thinking he looked somewhat like a director would, shooting somewhere on location, except instead of a coffee in hand, he had a beer. Whatever the question was, and neither of us could remember it later, I crossed the street and ended up spending all of my afternoon and early evening with Jack, a 55 year old freelance journalist.
We sat in the front of a little cafe, next to a pond full of lily pads and the scent of incense swirling passed us as we swilled beer and chatted about things I might not even chat with with my best friend. I have no idea why older men always seem to engage me in the best conversations. Jack was no exception. He would often ask a question, a rather forward and often innapropriate one, then once I had given any degree of an answer, he would withdraw the question, with an apology which sounded so proper and sincere with his tone of voice and lovely British accent, I forgave him immediately. We discussed politics, women, men, our futures, our pasts, our love lives, peppered with racy questions and firey anecdotes. Jack laughed and said, "As a journalist, I love to tell good stories, but even better, I love to hear good stories, and Ms. Mehrer, you are full of them!"
Soon, another friend of Jack's came along. Kenny, a Jewish lawyer from New York who described himself as "Ferdinand the bull on vacation", a force to be reckoned with in the courtroom in New York, but a gentle laid back guy armed with a camera on vacation in Bali. Both men were entertaining as they competed for airspace to tell me stories- all of us slightly drunk- Jack pinching Kenny and telling him he was so boring he could talk under wet cement, and Kenny retorting, "Look at the poor girl! She's been here all afternoon and she's starved for intelligent conversation!" It was obvious the men didn't like each other, but something beyond me, somehow drew them together, as they sat side by side arguing, swilling more beer, and insulting each other in a strangely endearing way.
After we finished at the restaurant, Jack and I continued our conversations on the front of his bungalow, wrapped in cheap sarongs so the dusk mosquitoes couldn't feed on our ankles. We ordered beer from the shy Balinese boys who would deliver bottles with wide smiles and smirks at Jack like having me there on the porch was already a notch on his belt. We walked around the grounds armed with a large butcher knife and cut red ginger plants that had already fallen. I did the cutting as I was the once more sober. We artfully arranged the giant beautiful plants and left them on his neighbour's doorstep- a gorgeous French painter Jack would have loved to seduce if she would only give him a chance.
The next day I googled Jack and nothing came up. hmmmm.... very interesting for a guy who claims he had worked for the BBC and had written stories for all of the major networks in a career of over thirty years. I could have gotten his name wrong, but maybe not. I decided not to ask him. He was harmless and too much fun as it was.
After my brief interlude with the old men, I went back to my other twosome who seemed to involuntarily fill my days. Eyal, another New Yorker who became my best girlfriend, and Ray, a handsome yoga instructor. Ray and I often spent hours sitting next to each other, leafing through the days' paper, sometimes deep in conversation, sometimes letting hours pass without a peep. During our chats we found we had a few yoga friends in common, and mused that had I gone south with my co-worker instead of north last time I was in Thailand, I would have been in Ray's class on Koh Tao! The yoga world is wonderfully microscopic!
The days grew into-well, days. I spent lots of time in vegetarian restaurants, discovering what it was like to be with someone as they came out of a fast and got onto the raw food diet. Eyal was in the midst of a life experiment on food. I watched him eat a tomato like it was the greatest orgasm he'd had. EVER. Ray and I would eat brownies and drink coffee as we listened to Eyal talk incessantly about the Raw Food diet and pick through his meager salad to eat vegetables in order of easy digestion. When Eyal wasn't around, Ray and I would talk incessantly about yoga and the way we both seemed to live our lives by the seat of our pants and liked it that way.
The life in Ubud was wonderful, but it seemed we all needed a bit of a shake up. Ray headed to Seminyak first, to feel out the life of a yoga instructor "down South." Eyal and I followed the day after- partly because we were a little bored, and partly because for different reasons we both decided it was time to leave our accommodations.
Eyal was worried his painter neighbour, a Javanese man, might have a crush on him, and having met the man, I can confirm that Eyal was not crazy. When he began muttering strange things about sleeping arrangements to Eyal through the thin wall, Eyal seemed a little reluctant to go home. I also was reluctant to sleep in my beautiful open loft flat, which I previously loved.
A few nights previously, as I slumbered away in my home away from home away from home, I woke to something trying to crawl up the side of my head. not a spider, not a lizard, but one of Mickey's larger cousins- a RAT! I bolted up, shook my hair out with my hands (Like a whole rat could still be stuck in my medium length mop). As I debated in fear about flipping on the light, my uninvited bed-guest made a run up my arm, which resulted in me flailing about, while doing the extended freaky dance next to my bed, letting out the most pathetic squeal ever. I flipped on the light but my little friend had made a clean get away. I checked around to make sure, hoping I didn't find anything, then I laid in bed for two hours,lights on, covers over my head, eyes wide open listening for sounds, bemoaning the fact that I was alone and had no one to help me scare the rats away.
The next night Eyal and I became reluctant roomates for a night, being brought to slumber next to each other by a crazy man and a rat. The next day I mused with Eyal about what would have happened if the rat had come back- And we agreed it would have probably just ended up with both of us doing the freaky dance together, squealing in harmony.
I had dinner with Jack to say goodbye. Jack had had a rough week of drinking, and so our goodbye conversation didn't reach the racy depths our previous conversations had. At the end of my dinner he leaned over and said, "I want to make something clear. Is it firmly established in your mind that I won't be receiving the pleasure of your company in my bed this evening?" I swallowed my bite and answered, "Yes, It's firmly established." "Right-oh," He answered, You'll be paying for your own meal this evening." "No problem," I answered, as I unfurled the equivalent of three Canadian dollars and placed it on the table.
Once it was established that no nookie was to be had and I was really not a lesbian, sadly, Jack began to well, I guess the word is -brag-, about the Balinese women he keeps as mistresses. I listened to his stories, beginning with some trist he had with a Balinese lady, and in the next breath, the mention of how much money he had, I began to feel sorry for him. Here was an intelligent, good looking older man who felt the only thing that made him attractive was his money. "Jack," I said, "I really hope from the bottom of my heart that when you find someone here in Bali, as it seems that's what you are looking for, I hope she realises that she is really lucky to have you, and doesn't just want you for a bank account." He looked at me for a moment, and said, "Thank you Ms. Mehrer, your delivery was flawless. You looked me straight in the eye and held my gaze. I believe you were really kind and sincere in that statement." Neither kind nor sincere, I spoke the truth.
Seminyak was fun, but largely uneventful. I spent my last day basking in the sun with Ray, who slathered himself in copious amounts of sunscreen and somehow still managed to turn red. He blamed it on his Irish heritage. "Wait a minute! I'm Irish too!" I mused, having laid out in the sun sans sunscreen and barely turning a shade. What a life! I breathed in the clean air deeply, put the thoughts of returning to unemployment in Shanghai the next day out of my mind, watched Indonesian and Australian boys play a thrashing game of beach football and defended my wallet from massage ladies and touts selling various things up and down the beach. That night, Ray and I lived it up in the Seminyak nightclubs, and we closed the bar at 4:30 am. I was up at 6:30 am for the flight back to Shanghai. Ouch.
A few photos from the trip:
"I'm still afraid of the monkeys, Jorge."
I love the bottom right monkeys- "Kiss me again, you fool!" "Awww come on you guys! People are watching and you two are siblings!"
Jack: "If Arachnophobia is the fear of spiders, What do you call the fear of monkeys?"
Melanie: "Intelligence."
