On
Friday we had a busy day preparing for Laura’s arrival. Did some shopping at
the Bintang Supermarket, made sure the spare bedroom was clean and ready for a
guest, and of course enjoyed a swim in the pool and relaxation!! Life is pretty
easy!!
I set
my alarm for 3 a.m. on Saturday morning and was up and dressed ready to go and
meet Laura when Made brought her from the airport around 3:30 a.m. I had
intended to walk down the lane to greet her, but no-one called to say they had
arrived, so it was the rattling of the handle on the gate that alerted me to
the fact they were here. As I was heading to open up, Wayan emerged from the
laundry, and between Made, Wayan and myself we got her installed in the spare
bedroom. We both pretty well crashed in bed immediately after that!!
The
next day, Friday, we took Laura for her initiation walk into Ubud and stopped
at the Lotus Café for lunch. The food is OK here, but the view over the lily
pond in front of the temple brings a few moments of beauty and tranquility to
the eating experience. For anyone just
arriving in Ubud, particularly from an organized country like Canada, it is a frenzied
collection of narrow streets lined with small tourist shops displaying
colourful nicks knacks or fashion, broken up, narrow, uneven sidewalks that
require your undivided attention, guys hawking car or bike taxi rides, lazy
dogs guarding the shop entrances, thousands of tourists of every nationality
strutting back and forth “on the strip” and shedding buckets of water onto
soggy handkerchiefs, SUVs, trucks, and motor scooters communicating with each
other by a series of horn blasts and exhausting waste gas into the
atmosphere so that it feels that your lungs are on fire. Returning to the
villa, we had a nice swim, and after a short nap to recover from her journeys,
we took our 100 steps to the Bali Dream Café for dinner.
On Saturday,
after a relaxing morning planning the next two weeks, and lunch at the
Englishman’s Café, we headed out for a walk in the Ubud rice fields. Also popped in to see a couple of new houses just being finished off and for rent. In the
evening I led her through the Penestanan lanes to the Bintang Supermarket.
Unfortunately, I didn’t think to take my head light, so the journey back was a
little precarious in the areas where the canals were on either side, or even on
one side, of the very narrow and uneven path.
Poor
Laura; in her first couple of days here she had been taken down a quiet back
lane, in the dark, by a strange man (Made) to the villa, then dragged by me in
the twilight homeward along the Bintang lane without a torch. Anyway, we made
it safely.
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