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Daily life in Bali
Denpasar, Bali, Indonesia, 2009-01-17 12:00 by Laerke
Today has been such a great day! It didn’t rain as Martin drove me to school, so I arrived nice and dry, the first class was a bit dense, but the second class was so much fun! The professor is such an entertainer and goof-ball :-) We were all laughing our way through class, I’m sure you learn a lot faster when it comes in with laughter.


Entrance to the Udayana University


School ends at noon, then we all pile into the tiny canteen (it looks a LOT like a warung) where the little Ibu served us delicious gado-gado and nice cooling “The Botol”. We were all talking housing over lunch, Petra have just found a nice room in Seminyak, 2 million Rupiah a month (approximately 1000kr or 500US) brand new and with a view over the rice paddies. As martin and I are still homeless (or more correctly we are staying in a really nice guesthouse with a pool right outside our doorstep, but we’d like to rent a house of our own), we had a date with a guy who is renting out a house in the outskirts of Denpasar for 2,5 million Rupiah a month, and we were happily surprised! It was a really nice little house, it is on a small quiet road with maybe 10 houses on – all of them look really well kept. “Our” house is quite small, it has 2 bedrooms, 2 small bathrooms and a living room with a kitchen in one end, and there are two Balinese house temples! I asked the guys what we are gonna do about that, because we don’t know how to do the offerings (that you actually have to do 3-5 times a day) so we don’t really have the time either! But then again you don’t want angry house spirits... They quickly talked it over and said that the spirits wouldn’t be mad, but if we were concerned about it they could come and do the offerings for us :-). There are some special considerations when renting a house in Bali, not quite the same as at home, but that is just the charm of it.



After a couple of days of heavy rain, today the sun decided to come out! So as soon as we got back to our hotel we jumped in the pool. After we had dried off we were invited over for noodle soup by our neighbor, a friendly talkative Indonesian woman and her 2 cute kids that are half Dutch. Mom speaks Indonesian and some English, the daughter; Meeka goes to an International school and speaks with a heavy American accent and the little boy; Mickey speaks mostly Indonesian with some English words here and there. So we all chatted away in a mix of Indonesian and English.
After noodle soup and chocolate biscuits, Martin and I drove to the beach. The beach looked so beautiful in the sunshine and the water was all clear, we just swam and lazed and enjoyed that it wasn’t raining. Tonight we are going out for sushi – yum!









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