Dear Friends and Family,
It is not without sadness that I said goodbye to the compound and my status as houseboy on "lifestyles of the rich and Balinese." My new place, while being well within my budget, lacks certain amenities that we in the western world have come to expect. A flush toilet for example. More on that later.
The day I left my host's compound, I was a bit worried about finding a place that wouldn't overextend me. The answer was to take a place closer to the outskirts of Ubud that was recommended to me by Ketut, the guy who stocks the store room at the restaurant. He actually stopped what he was doing, grabbed his motor bike, and drove me around to look at places. He didn't even want me to pay him for his trouble. As a result of his efforts, I now live in a place that is nicer than you would expect it to be for the jaw dropping price of $70 US per month.
"Nicer than you would expect it to be" does not come without a few notable flaws. For starters, there is no flush on the toilet. There is instead, the classic southeast Asian tub-of-water-with-bucket setup. You flush by pouring a bunch of water down the pot but since the bucket is only half sized, I am having considerable difficulty getting anything to go down. I think paying for utilities in Bali means purchasing bigger buckets so you don't have poo permanently floating in your commode. I don't even know if toilet paper will go down as there isn't any to test with. It didn't help that this realization came only after a violent bout of Bali belly. There I sat, staring at the peeling paint and the lines of ants marching across the wall, everything bathed in the light of a dangling fluorescent bulb that makes even white tile look dingy and sick. I couldn't help musing to myself, that just a few days earlier I was enjoying a candlelit gourmet dinner for ten in the compound, our food perfumed by the Jasmine trees and washed down with flutes of Dom Perignon. Ah well, now I'm stuck with the runs and only a water spritzer with almost zero pressure to try to rectify the problem.
The good news is that the trickle of water turns warm after a while. Also, the nice old lady who I'm renting from has supplied me with a hot pink mosquito net that she swears the Japanese tourists love. There is a fan, and I live next to a rice paddy so the views aren't too bad. I also rented a motorbike (for almost as much as the room) so that I can explore Bali on my days off. I will try to walk to work as often as possible but I bet the bike will come in handy there too.
Well, I guess the good life has been replaced by real life. With my bike and room, and my job officially starting this week, I feel like I'm embarking on a brand new chapter of my trip. A bit less glamorous but hopefully very satisfying nonetheless. I probably won't spend too much time at home anyway. Who wants to be indoors when it is blue and tropical outside? I just wish the fluorescent lighting wasn't so damn depressing.
Hugs,
Alex
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