Landed late at night and a rainy drive up north from Denpasar to my home base at Sri Bungalows in Ubud. Walked all over town the next morning (although didn’t do more than a circle on the main drags of town because had to be back and meet my driver at 1). As I’ve said to Made, my driver, I can’t get over how may stores are here. All small boutique-y stores with tourist trinket/local handicraft stores sprinkled all along the way. You can see the Balinese at work, as well as dressed in traditional garb walking with offerings for their Temple (photo above). But the streets are (to me) surprisingly filled with tourists (Australians in great numbers and then many Germans) and ex-pats; white people everywhere. It’s not the town of “Eat, Pray, Love” that I had pictured in my mind. That’s the danger of having expectations! Lots of restaurants and warungs (small restaurants with the stall-type kitchens). I haven’t eaten in one of the local ones because Made says they all use waaaay too much MSG. Speaking of Made (pronounced ma-day), didn’t you know that all Indonesian children get the same name? Firstborn is Wayan, 2nd Made, 3rd Nyoman and 4th Ketut. Not so many of the last two these days, he says, with the advent of birth control. Speaking of children, it is part of their culture beliefs that children are perfect when born (then what happens?), so their feet do not touch the ground for the first three months of their lives. Anyway, the Balinese are religious and superstitious people and are primarily Hindu with much animism thrown in. As a result, they place little offerings of flowers and incense in little leaf-woven baskets all over the place (picture above) daily, to keep mean and mischievous spirits from coming into homes and businesses. There is a very high order of social organization: most live in their family compound, which all have a fairly common layout; each family is a member of a particular Temple; and every family’s community works together to help the others prepare for offering and festivals in the Temple, as well as the much-talked-about (but not witnessed by this visitor) cremation process. As it happened, the day before my arrival was the festival for Made’s family and the day after my arrival was the purification ceremony at the Temple. Some how (hahaha) I got myself invited, so had to go and buy a sarong and sash to be properly dressed for the ceremony. And because the handicraft villages were kind of one after the other, I found myself shopping on my first afternoon here – not really my preference, but gotta go with it. First stop wood-carving village, then to the weavers, where I received a full explanation of how they created the beautiful patterns in the textiles (painted batik or dyed with ties), and finally to the silver jewelry shop. The nice older man explained how they created the silver wire and the incredibly small beads that they used to decorate the jewelry (yes, taylor, you scored here). All that accomplished, we headed back to the hotel. On my own for the evening and started to explore the streets a little.