Typical Good Day

Thursday. The meeting for the culture excursion was announced for 12:30 pm at Sentral Parkir, Kuta. Woke up that grey rainy morning and had about an hour more until I would have to take a shower and go there. It was windy and a bit cold for local conditions. However, I brushed my teeth, put on boardshorts and was at the beach within five minutes. Still earlier and cloudy, it was empty, the air some kind of misty and the water had the typical colour for that weahter, a matte mix of grey-blue and mintgreen. A perfect medium sized slow and resitant wave was peeling along that lonely beachbreak in front of my compound. There was regular swell with just a little close out. Laura had smsed before that she´s too tired. In the Halfway some hundred meters south as well as in a wave north of me there were only a few surfers. So I was alone in this section, paddeled out with a feeling of hapiness and luck, like a baby dolphin, sliding through the waves. Rode some perfect malibu style crests and compensated three busy days in one hour.


Then I went to the parking area and we got on the bus for our excursion to a traditional Balinese village and two tempels. Pak Suastra, our teacher in Indonesian History and Culture, joined the trip and explained us about the functions of each part of the tempel and about the village architecture. The traditional villages on the mountain slopes of this vulcanic island are always built along an axis from the mountain top where also the temple is situated to the ocean which consitutes another divine vicinity. It was again interesting to see how deeply the people here are into their religion. Almost every house has a temple, every neighbourhood and every village has several temples for different kinds of ceremonies, every district and so on and so forth, Pak Suastra says, that Bali has hundreds of thousands of temples.