So That's Why They Call It the Rainy Season

I had just finished lunch in Ubud and was en route to finding a new cafe with wifi, when it started to rain. I ducked into the market to buy an umbrella (usually I wouldn't mind getting wet but my computer was in my backpack), at which point it started pouring. Now, I'm not talking "slightly above a drizzle" pouring. Nope -- after about twenty minutes, the streets looked like rivers, current and little rapids included. A very nice group of Balinese people let me sit in their pottery stall for a couple of minutes, until I got bored and ventured out. I wish I'd had my camera with me. It really was amazing.

Anyway. The French tourist story.

A couple of weeks ago (I think; my comprehension of the passage of time is a little wonky at this point), my Ibu and Bapak informed me that two French tourists would be staying in the spare bedroom across from mine for two nights. (By across I mean in the building next to mine, the one with the bathroom I use. I think I've explained that Balinese houses tend to be a collection of small buildings rather than one big one. If I haven't, well, then, there you go.) Apparently this sort of thing happens with some frequency; as long as my host family has spare bedrooms, they figure they may as well use them.

That evening, I was sitting on my porch reading when an enormous tour bus pulled onto our street. We live on a fairly major street in Bedulu, but it's not the main road that goes through town and to see a tour bus there was bizarre. I had assumed it was just going to be two random tourists; instead, it turned out, it was a whole group.

So these two ladies came into the yard accompanied by one of the group guides and my Bapak. I tried very hard not to judge them by the enormousness of their suitcases (which really were bigger than mine, and I've been here for two and a half months. Ah well.) Bapak showed them the room, and hardly a moment passed when there was a shriek. Ibu and I looked in that direction, and caught something about a lizard. They had seen a tokek, the bigger of two varieties of gecko commonly found in Bali. Now, if you piss off a tokek (i.e. by chasing it or trying to catch it), it might bite you, which'll probably hurt. But short of that, they're totally harmless. I'm pretty sure one lives behind my closet. Still, they refused to go back into the room until the guide came out with a dead lizard in hand, which he did.

While this was going on, my ibu and kakak (older brother) and I were cracking up, teasing them in Indonesian. My ibu asked me if I was afraid of lizards, and I laughed, telling her that they're everywhere and there's no sense in being afraid. I didn't have the heart (or the language skills) to explain to the two Frenchwomen that another tokek would probably find its way into the room later.

Things were pretty uneventful until the next night, when Bapak came to get them to go to some dance performance their group had planned. As they were leaving, one of the women pointed at the painting that hangs outside my kakak's door. "I bought one just like that!" she said. "Only bigger."

So my bapak promptly started trying to sell it to her. He explained to them that he and Ibu own a painting shop, which is kind of true, in that my Ibu owns a tourist tchotchke store outside of Goa Gajah which sells some paintings, among other things. Then he named a fairly ridiculous price.
She declined, but said, "maybe we got it at the same place!"

At this point, my bapak feigned being upset. "No, no, no!" he exclaimed. "I painted it myself."

Up to this point, my ibu and I had been watching the exchange with interest, giggling occasionally, but at this point we completely lost it. My bapak is a very talented man, and he makes awesome woodcarvings (that being his job), but he definitely doesn't paint. Without thinking, I said to him, "bohong!" which means liar. For a moment, I panicked, not sure if it was really bad to tease one's elder. Fortunately, when I said it my ibu laughed even harder and repeated it to him.

The French women didn't buy the painting. Still, it was a pretty entertaining thing to watch.



In other news, to answer Ryan's question about whether auspicious days are spontaneous:

So, the Balinese have several calendars. There's the lunar calendar, which determines when things like Nyepi fall. Then there's a seven-day calendar, based on the Gregorian calendar and used for things like school calendars and general day-to-day business, since it matches internationally. It's also the basis for the 210-day Balinese year, since the calendar is made up of 30 seven-day wuku, or weeks. That determines when a temple's odalan, or temple birthday, falls. Then there's a five-day calendar and a three-day calendar, both based off of traditional market days (one Javanese and one Balinese, though I can never remember which is which). Then there's also a calendar that works something like 1-day week, 2-day week, 3-day week, etc etc, but that one is completely over my head so I won't even try to explain it.

The point is, when you look at a Balinese calendar, it's got all sorts of writing on it. Each day will have the Gregorian date, the Gregorian day of the week, and then what day of the five-day, three-day, bizarre cycle I don't understand, and lunar week it is. Also, all of the wukus have their own name, so that's on there, too.

As far as I can tell, in terms of religious offerings, the five-day and three-day week are most important (although the wuku is important for odalans). Each week has its "most auspicious day," and the intersection of those days, Kaja-Kliwon, is the most auspicious day of all. A lot of rituals go on on that day. Days that are just Kaja or just Kliwon are also reasonably auspicious, and I think some of the other intersections are too. Some of them are not auspicious at all, but I don't know which particular days those are.

So to make a long story short, yes, people absolutely know about these events in advance. They take a ton of planning, especially for something like the enormous odalan at Besakih. In the days before a festival, women are making various offerings out of palm leaves and flowers, and the men are doing the cooking necessary for sacrifices and offerings. Also, the temples are decorated, and I imagine the high priests are also doing a whole bunch of things to prepare (though I can't say with certainty what they are).

But this stuff also goes on on a daily basis, too, since every day people make offerings, usually in the mornings and the evenings, part of whatever they've cooked that day. It's actually kind of problematic: a generation or two ago, people made offerings less frequently, but as tourism and other forces have emphasized Balinese Hinduism, there has been pressure to make more offerings. In and of itself, that's not necessarily problematic, except for the fact that daily offerings require both a lot of money and a lot of time. As a result, some Balinese families put more effort into offerings than things like education.

Still, it is pretty cool to watch the whole community come together in preparation for the big festivals. Everyone gets really excited, and the temples really do look spectacular. Plus, it's a lot of fun to get to go to them.

Woosh!

That's the sound of time passing quickly. I didn't realize it'd been so long since I'd last posted!

The last few weeks have been pretty laid-back. We're prepping for our independent study period (ISP), so we've had a bunch of papers due and we have exams next week. After that, classes are over and we have a month to explore the topic of our choice. I'll be studying satua, traditional folktales, most of which are animal fables. I'm going to be going around Bedulu (some people are going elsewhere on the island, but I like Bedulu and I really like hanging out with my host family) getting as many people to tell me stories as possible. Then I'm going to try to figure out why the stories aren't told as commonly now as they were before (my hypothesis: electricity, TV, and public education). Then I'm going to attempt to deduce whether there's a correllation between people not telling the stories as much and changing cultural values.

Basically, it's all an excuse to get people to tell me stories.

Prep for ISP -- meeting with my advisor, writing up the proposal, etc. -- has been taking a lot of my free time, but last night I went with my host parents to two huge temple festivals. Now, I can only understand some of what my host family says to me (and I think because they know that they never give me fully comprehensive explanations of what's going on), so I had been under the impression that at six o'clock, we would ride a bus to Besakih, the biggest and most important temple in Bali, then go to the festival, eat dinner, and head home.

Technically, all those things happened. At 6, we piled into the car and drove toward Mas, where my bapak works. We met up with his boss and some people he works with, then sat around on the bale (sort of a porch/gazebo-ish structure) for a while waiting for more people to show up. Then we piled onto a big bus (the kind they use for tours), at which point my ibu informed me it would be a two-hour ride. Roughly an hour and a half later, we arrived at Pura Ulun Batur, the second biggest/most important temple in Bali. I figured maybe I had misheard my host parents. We prayed for ten minutes (the big festivals are a pretty quick in-and-out affair, because there are so many people who want to make offerings and pray), then walked back to the bus.

"Next we'll go to Besakih," my ibu said. That would take another hour to get to, and by this point it was around nine pm. I snacked on some of the fruit my ibu had bought, and napped. When we got there, I was floored. Besakih is huge -- my ibu said that there are 1000 temples within the complex, but I think that might be a little bit of an exaggeration, but only a little bit -- and the whole thing was fully adorned with brightly colored fabric, gold, offerings, flowers, and fruit.

We first walked up the stairs (the temple is on a hillside) to a relatively smaller temple to pray. My bapak said that there are different temples for different castes; because the family follows the patriarch's caste, we were in the ksatriya temple. (Quick review: there are three high castes. First is brahmana, the priestly caste. Second highest is ksatriya, the warrior/ruling class. Third, I believe, is wesya, the merchant class. After those castes come the sudra, the commoners. Caste in Bali isn't nearly as important as it is in India, but it does determine things like where in a village someone lives and where one goes to pray.) After that, we went to the main courtyard, which was enormous. The ground was covered in offerings that others had made and left. We knelt, waited for the high priest to begin instruction (which basically involves when to pray, who to pray to, and when to stop), then followed his instructions. After that, we were finished, and walked down the stairs of the temple.

At this point, it was roughly 11:30pm. My bapak went to buy us fish sate, and we sat on a wall alongside the road and ate it with rice and fruit that my ibu had bought. When we finished, it was time to head home, and we piled onto the bus again. We got home around 1:15am, and I headed to bed.

The temple festival at Besakih lasts for 15 days, in order to accomodate all of the people who want to come. Later in the week, my brothers and their wives will go. I'm not sure if they'll go to Ulun Batur, too, but it wouldn't surprise me if that festival also lasts for a long time. To an outsider, it appears that these festivals just kind of pop up without reason, but usually it's because it's an especially auspicious day. I'm pretty sure these festivals were odalan, which is sort of like a temple birthday and happens twice a year (because the relevant Balinese calendar has 210 days).