Bali Dogs

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So, I haven't made a journal post in a while, and all that while I've been in Indonesia. I live in Jakarta. There is a few things you need to know about it, but most of it can be summed up by saying it sucks. It's hot, a lot hotter than Brazil, the air is polluted, it's invested with mosquitos carrying all the nasty disease, the roads are clogged with traffic, and the sidewalk has gaping holes in it (seriously). Sure the food's nice and it's not boring like Brasilia and stuff is cheap and there is lots of cats, but it still sucks.

And school. Supposedly it's the best highschool in the entire world, Obama's sister is an alumni. I'm just going to leave it at I prefer small cosy schools were people actually care about people outside of their freaking cliques and you actually feel like someone. Meanwhile back at my old school my best friend is now Student Body President (we were both in student body council last year, I was secretary and he was treasurer) and a new girl moved in who apparently would have been my perfect match. It's only now that I'm allowed to date, and I don't think there is anyone here worth my time and effort for one reason or another, or if there is I can't find her through the sea of people who aren't.

Since my social life is now all but dead I've had some time to work on this: sites.google.com/site/ponyarpg… In case you haven't heard, I'm leading a Pony Zelda Game project. Some one please help me, I'm about to loose my mind when I think about all that still needs to be done and how few people we have.

I think sometime in September my family went on vacation for a few days in Yogyakarta. We stayed at a house down the street from this fried chicken joint with the cheapest fried chicken (and worst "beef burgers", which were essentially a slice of salami) and we saw lots of famous Buddhist temples and stuff. It was fun enough, and soon we were home and back in hell.

October was when the school play (Dracula), and because I came in the year late all the parts were taken, but I could still be thrown into the role in the preshow, which was some sort of asylum thing that people just walked past on their way in. Yay... A few days before the show starts the entire preshow was redesigned, so all the rehearsals we did were for naught, and then the next day on top of this I'm assigned to the stage crew, so there goes my chance for sneaking into the audience after the preshow and watching it normally, and I knew absolutely nothing about being in the stage crew. Somehow I managed to survive all of that and the show went on smoothly.

Later was Halloween, but that isn't celebrated in Indonesia, so the only thing there was a bunch of people in cars giving out candy at the compound I live on. I throw on my old greaser outfit from when I was in Grease and went with that. Probably my most lackluster Halloween ever.

In November my father went to Cambodia to take notes for big and important people like Hillary Clinton and that Russian guy, and go to his own boring meetings while touring Cambodia while not working and looked at Kmer Rouge skull mounds and stuff and eat weird insect dishes. He came back in time for an insect free Thanksgiving, and I got a T-shirt with a landmine warning sign on it.

December came, and thank the lord after some painful finals the school year finally ended. I'm so not looking forward to going back in a little over a week. I hate it so much. Then we left for Bali.

Bali is pretty much what paradise is. We passed through rainforest covered mountains, passing rice terraces and temples everywhere. We stopped at a Buffet with a nice view for lunch, which was pretty mediocre. Indonesia food pretty much boils down to fried rice, fried chicken, peanut sauce, this one vegetable dish whose name I forgot, meat on skewers called satte or something like that, and like three other things.  The chicken satte here wasn't actually chicken, it was somesort of mixture of chicken and coconut, I think. I'm not quite sure.

Anyway, we continued, and found this temple. It had a frog temple off the side of it, several animal statues like a pair of soul eating deers, a pair of soul eating bears, and a demon boar, and this deer inclose with real deer. The thing that interested me the most was that they had live animals that you could take pictures with. They had trios of these cute, cuddly owls, bigger owls, hawks and maybe even an eagle, hornbills, and flying foxes. Now, apparently the proper way to pose with a fruit bat is to hold it's wings, which are very leathery. Later we encountered a guy with animals on the road who also had fruitbats. He also had an iguana, a boa, and a chameleon. Chameleons are freaking awesome, completely alien. Changing color isn't that remarkable at all. Their skin texture is different from other reptiles, rougher. They also have eight feet, two on the end of each leg, or at least that's what it looks like. Their tail is curly and prehensile.  And their eyes do what their eyes do. Doesn't quite beat taking a picture while touching a Komodo Dragon as Asia has no safety for anything, but still awesome.

Eventually we made it to the house we were staying at in Lovina on the north, less westernized side of the island. The house was right on the beach in a rural community. While my car rides were spent mainly listening to music I spent my nights mainly reading (though one night we watched the highest quality tv show ever made, Jari Sakti Somad, it's about a kid who is a chef who uses kung fu magic or something). It was there I finally read Animal Farm. What struck me about the book was how close they were to paradise, all they needed was someone to stop Napoleon. If only Boxer wasn't so stupid he could have smashed in Squealer's Squealer and done away with Napoleon. If only Benjamin released he did care about something sooner he could have done something and actually made a change. If only they stood up for what they really believed...

The next day we went snorkeling and we saw clams and sea squirts and corals and sea anemeas and all different types of fish. The only types I could label were Clownfish and Parrot Fish. That was cool. Of the course of the week we saw all sorts of cool stuff, like this monkey forest with lots of monkeys acting like monkeys, a barong and keris dance, and of course lots of temples, a few of which we had to explore while it was raining and we had to make use of whatever protection we could find, like straw hats and palm fronds (and umbrellas). If you ever plan on visiting a Hindu Temple, remember these two things. The first is you should own a surong, it will come in handy, secondly, don't visit Bali during your period if you are a girl.

One minor thing I remember is we hiked around this waterfall. We eventually came to this man's house and farm, and he made civet coffee (look it up, it's pretty legendary). He gave us some jackfruit and let us hold his civets. There were four of them in a large cage, perfectly content as far as I could tell. Now, civets are the most adorable things ever. The cat-weasels just clung onto the front of my shirt and licked the salt off of my arms while I could feel their little hearts beating rapidly in my hands. Another thing I remember is one night when we came home we still needed to walk a ways from the car to the house, and outside it was raining at a level only commonly found in the tropics. I sat in the car, then a man opened the door and handed me is umbrella. Later on I walked back to his house to return his umbrella with one of our own in my other hand to shield me from the rain. It was the dead of night, and I stood outside his house, watching his family do whatever they were doing, noticing all the bottles of Coca Cola they had. I remember standing on the sand with an umbrella in each hand, the ocean crashing to my left, nothing between me and it, only a few yards away, standing outside the house of a mysterious stranger who had helped me, standing at the opposite side of the world from what I once called home. I asked myself "What the hell am I doing here, how did I get here?" Of course I knew how, but why me? Why? I am nobody. I don't deserve this, not even the umbrella I held in my hand. Soon enough I returned it, thanked them, and left back into the night.

The other thing that stuck out the me there are the dogs. The Bali Street Dog is an ancient breed from the same stock as the dingos in Australia. They come in many colors, but they all share the same body type. Now, while Jakarta is full of stray cats, it has hardly any dogs. In Bali it's the opposite, this is probably because Jakarta is predominately Muslim while Bali is Hindu. Now, these dogs, what struck me about them is how happy they looked. Indeed, they were living in Paradise. These dogs were poor, but they didn't need more. They had food, and more importantly they had freedom. I think I saw that in the people of Bali, reflected in their dogs. While modern conveniences are taking a foot there the traditional lifestyle is still alive. Bali just breathes with life. As I stare at the geckos on the walls and count how many more of them there are in Bali than in Jakarta and Brasilia and how it has huge Tokays as well, I see that that's the way it's meant to be. Man is not meant to curb nature, he is meant to build a house for it, build walls for the geckos to climb, not walls to keep the geckos out. There is something just so wrong about our attitude, I hate it.

Soon enough we came home. Christmas came, and I got lots of mostly meaningless gifts. Pretty much all of us got sick with a terrible fever   on that day, and we were convinced it might be Dengue. We went to the doctor the next day, and after waiting in a waiting room for hours the blood results finally came in and dengue was negative. We just had some sort of other viral disease, which was still terrible, but it's gone away by now. I think. I still have a bit of a headache but that might be from a lack of sleep. I guess there might be lesson in this, but now I just want some sleep, so goodnight.
© 2012 - 2024 Ganondox
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