TEN SHOTS: BALI

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Offerings to the Gods are made constantly throughout a Balinese woman's day.  Whenever a meal is cooked, an arrangement of flowers, food and holy water is placed on the alter as well as on every tool and surface used to make the meal.  There are countless other reasons to make offerings.  On any given street, you'll find at least a dozen flower offerings.  Every time we went to use our scooter, there was an offering on the seat and at the entrance to the driveway.

Local coffee with local coconut milk, local paper.  For being a coffee destination, we were surprised to find that the coffee is not cheap! (almost $4 for this one).

BUGS EVERYWHERE.  Crickets and snails and moths and beetles and frogs and geckos galore.
I understand that some of these things are not bugs.

Our house had a garden full of guavas!  We made a lot of jam.  Everything smelled like guavas.

Balinese massage in the rice fields.  $9 for 80 minutes made it one of the most ridiculous deals we've found on our trip!

View from our room during the afternoon storm.  Every day around 3pm, the clouds would move in and darken and just flood everything.  The sound was deafening.  Our room was like an amphitheater. 

But that's why things are so green!

Babi Guling, the famous Balinese whole pig.  This was not our favorite pig, as the meat is chopped up into small pieces before being served and that made Read sad, but their method of take out (in that handmade paper cone) is pretty sweet.

This is a Balinese family compound, where families as large as 30-40 people live together.  The left building is where all the ceremonies take place - every deceased family member has had death rites performed on that bed.  The small narrow building to the right of it is where they store their rice.  In the front yard, all the children's placentas are buried in the ground and marked with a rock, so that visitors can count the rocks and easily know how many children the family has.  Most locals in Ubud still live in compounds.

Food stalls in the street and market were often pretty inaccessible to foreigners.  Lots of dishes were made with blood, from sausage to salad, and were super spicy.  The chilies in America that we call hot, the Balinese call sweet peppers.
Also: this woman is staring at me because I am Asian and Read is white.

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