Life is a Carnival

My first week here, on my first trip to the night market to get dinner I commented that "life is a carnival". Walking through the street I was immediately taken to the South Carolina State Fair. It genuinely feels like a carnival here. Balloons, music, live animal smells, fried food... you get the idea. Dun (french guy) didn't get my reference to The Band or a carnival and instead he kinda gave me a blank stare. So I dropped it and moved on to listening to him complain about wine or cheese or something like that. Anyway, moving forward six months, this weekend Gianyar had a carnival. No change. The "carnival" was basically moving everything from the night market street and moving it two blocks over to the soccer field. Still nobody picked up on it trick the place was packed with at least five times as many people as normal, for the exact same thing. Needless to say I drank the cool-aid, ate some pop-corn and hopped on the merry-go-round.

Agung

Last weekend I hiked Gunung Agung with some friends of mine, conveniently, both named Chris. (The picture here is from the summit, looking southeast towards the Lombok and the Gili's). The volcano crater is 10308 feet above sea and you start the climb around 300 feet. It turns out that it gets really cloudy at the peak so your have to get there early in the morning to get a good view, and since the last 3 hours of the hike is a 45˚ + incline with nothing but loose rocks and strong winds camping doesn't make much sense. The hike takes about 6-7 hours there and about 5 to get back. So with a little bit of simple math we figured that we should start around midnight. The hike was pretty tiring and combined with no sleep and hiking in the dark made it quite a challenge but the views from the top made it all worth it. We got there minutes before the sun rose (causing a bit of a mad scramble up the last bit to make sure we didn't miss it). The picture below is looking down on the top of Gunung Batar, which, around 30,000 years ago was the tallest mountain in Bali until a massive eruption of lava and ash emptied the magma chamber beneath the volcano so rapidly that the top of the volcano collapsed into itself. Imagine watching some video of that! 

For more, better quality pictures check out facebook, it just didn't make sense to post them twice.

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Who knew the Esso club had gone international? The sweet tea wasn't quite up to par but I'm not complaining.

Shades of Bali

I've been trying to think of a way to describe of what life looks like in Bali. It's turned out to be more difficult than I imagined because Bali is an island of extremes and contradictions. 

Probably any images you can conjure up are accurate depictions of one part of the island and then completely wrong if you go a mile down the road. For instance, a few minutes from my house there are two multi-million dollar mansions set in a rice field surrounded by farmers who barely make enough to survive. Then there is Kuta, an Australian party town that puts TJ or Cancun to shame, compared with Ubud, a quiet tourist town where people go to "find themselves" or learn about traditional

 Balinese culture. Then there are beautiful mountains and pristine beaches next to piles of trash that make the city of Shanghai seem environmentally responsible. Also, it's a hindu island inside the largest Muslim country in the world. So you have people who follow rigid Islamic law surrounded by people who practice a form of hinduism where anything goes as long as you don't harm others. So here are a few pictures from around Bali that will hopefully do a better job of explaining Bali than I can....

 

 

mountains of north Bali

 

sunset at Kuta

my 7th graders

the teachers lounge

some of my 4th and 5th graders

view from my roof

the guys dorms

Kuta

traditional market

cremation ceremony

cliffs at Ulu Watu