Wow, I've been a lazy butt in terms of updating my blog. Sorry about that. Anyways, I'm having a pretty good time in Bali overall. On the first day here my whole family went on a bird-seeing walk. We got to go to the rice paddies and the nearby forest. Now, I don't have my computer so I won't be posting photos and videos any time soon, but it was really beautiful. I really like the rice paddies- it was interesting to learn about the different sorts of rice and their growing times. Apparently, traditional Balianese rice takes 5 months to grow. However, the government decided to have people grow 3-month rice. This disrupts the ecosystems pretty badly. Due to this occurring, the government is now trying to get people to grow the normal 5-month rie again.
Yesterday we went on a taxi-tour to various art works places. Overall we visited a painting gallery, a wood shop, a Batik-shop, and a silver shop. They all had demonstrations outside of how the people make the goods. We ended up purchasing 3 beautiful paintings at the first shop. There were so many paintings, it would have been easy to spend all day in that place! I can't recall the order of places we went, but I think we went to the wood carving shop next. They had a lot of really large carvings for sale. I got a little painted mask there. Afterwards, we went to a silver jewlery shop. Mom and I both got a pair of earrings. Everything was kind of expensive there, which is relative in Indonesia. 9,000 RP is about USD $1.
Last we went to the Batik shop. Batik is the way people put designs on their clothing here. They use many wax layers and dyes to make really lovely patterns.
After the Batik shop we went to Turtle Island, which was really sort of stupid. There was a sea turtle conservatory (government operated), but there wasn't a ton to see other than the baby turtles in little plastic baskets. There were a pair of larger sea turtles that I fed, but for some reason it's not exactly what I expected.
I hope to go surfing soon this week, on Saturday maybe. We visited Kuta briefly yesterday, but it was too late in the day to learn to surf.
Today my mom and I went shopping while my father went on another bird-watching walk. He and a great time and took a lot of cool photos. Mom and I got some nice new clothes but we had to go back to the hotel a bit early because I'm sort of sick. I think the fruit juice did me in.
Oh well. Tomorrow we're going to a cooking class with a trip to a local market. That's going to be a story, for sure!
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