she does get around. Click through for a slideshow
Category: Travel
Mom’s Zanzibar lunch
 This is Mom’s favorite place to eat in Bali. Probably.
Click through for a short slideshow.
Bali breakfast
At 11 AM he is sipping red wine and smoking a cigarette. His salad comes. Of course he’s speaking French. Beer at 11 is Australian. Red wine before noon is French.
entry visas
We invited our buddy R to stop by our place any time. But he mentioned to Dian how awkward he’d feel explaining to the ‘guards’ at the Jayakarta front gate that his friends lived at Jayakarta and that he’d like to pop by. That really, he’s not a terrorist and really, even though he owns next-to-nothing, that he won’t go snooping around and violate the sacred space of the people with white skin.
I thought for about a second that maybe giving him a note from me would get him ‘in’ — of course it’s crazy, how demeaning. Maybe I’ll write a note and silkscreen it on to T-shirts and give them away to all my Indonesian buddies from the beach.
Bali: reason #1
Let’s face it: the best reason to come to Bali is to see all all dogs riding on motorcycles as people bring them to the beach to run around. Many of them sit on the foot platform on the 125 cc motorcycles, sometimes in baskets; on the larger bikes dogs are on towels placed on the gas tank, or standing with front paws on the handlbars. You could do a book of photographs of the creative ways that even large dogs are brought to the beach for their sunset leg-lifts.
round earth proofings/a sea bent on itself
Landing in the evening after leaving in the evening, he wondered: Will I ever be so cool that I’m not humbled by having the sun rise and set in the same window of the airplane, on one long flight?
My home is in my head.
–Bob Marley
Kuala Lumpur and Singapore slideshow
We laughed, we cried, we even left some crap for other people to buy. For a slideshow of our little trip, click here.
shopping lint
Singapore: squalor-free. The first few days is a feeling of relief at the ease of it all, especially if you’ve arrived from the manic inefficiency of Jakarta or India, for instance. You will drink water straight from the tap, because you can. You will not hail a cab by peeing toward traffic as some tourists do, elsewhere. Careful though: without a purpose, staleness might set in. That’s what shopping is for, thought the less evolved (or was it more self-involved?) might feel a niggling guilt at abandoning the ‘road to more’ for the Orchard Road to more trinkets. I was with 3 world-class shoppers who talked me down.
Overheated and steamrolled by the retail mayhem, I also found this lint as I gazed at my navel:
I see no warped/creative side of this prosperity. As we know, this is normally bestowed on a society through a scene created by obnoxious youth who feel disenfranchised and therefore entitled to create their own ‘decadent’ tangents, timely distillates, the best of which becomes art that endures and expands the culture.
The feeling of everyone being on the same page here is palpable; there is no sign that success is measured by anything other than established standards and roles for people. There are no cracks that might show alternate sensibilities; I see no flyers on bulletin boards advertising underground shows for music either electronic or guitar-based; footwear is oppressively, disappointingly clean.
All this has been said before; ‘A’ and I observed years ago that the scene here after dark had no noncommercial edges and felt it showed something profound about this place, especially the youth.
As a society SG seems content to refine/improve existing processes relevant to the material wellbeing of its citizens, and young people seem unaware of anything greater than that purpose. A guy told me that he felt very lucky to be from a civilized bubble in Asia’s chaotic sea, and a small fear every time he left. Maybe this fear is what continues to drive a society with little interest in second thoughts, impractical navelgazing or tangents of originality. Who was I to argue?