Jim and Maree's notes

20/1/2014 Monday

Orientation day started lots of new people. The house is full all the new volunteers all are young ladies from all over some from Holland, Britain, Russia, Germany, Slovakia and China. We have been divided into groups of 20 for the orientation. Some blokes in the other group but not in our group of 20 only Jim. Day started with some custom awareness.  The Balinese in the village of Ubud live in family compound with many buildings. The building include a small family Temple and a central area with separate family rooms and cooking area. The people are very devout in their Hindu religion offering gifts to the gods each day and these range from small offerings of rice on a leaf to larger more elaborate offering of flowers and decorated woven baskets filled with leaves, flowers rice etc. Something we did not realise is that there is a caste system here with 4 levels and people are requires to marry into their own caste. When people marry outside their cast it causes difficulties.

We walked to the main street market today and explored for a while, loads of things for sale and bargains to haggle for.  We have bought sarongs each as we need these to go to temples. However we have no room for extra.  From there we went to the monkey forest which was beautiful, but we were careful around the monkeys as they can jump on you and snatch your belongings.

From the monkey forest we walked back to our home and found another wee café and used free wifi there.  I had a very nice ginger tea, of freshly grated ginger which you add an unprocessed sugar to sweeten. Admin in the afternoon with Volunteer agency.

In the evening we went to a cultural show with the volunteer group.  It was an experience, the woman’s costumes were beautiful and very elaborate. We found the story difficult to interpret, there was also a fire dance at the end and I got covered in soot.  By the time we left the show there was torrential rain and the most thunderous thunder storm with lightning that I have ever experienced.

 

21/1/14 Tuesday

Second day of orientation week. Language class today, which was challenging.  We are only too aware of the linguistic ability of the other volunteers.  Many of the girls speak at least two or three languages, which helps them pick up the language much easier than Jim & I.

After that we went on a long walk 3hrs to see the rice fields, many of which were terraced. Very beautiful as was the surrounding forest. We stopped and looked at a local artist who decorated wooden eggs by finely painting scenes on them, the young son also worked as an artist after school and was also very talented with his sketching.

After dinner the lady from the homestay has just delivered us a lovely basket of fruit, including a snake fruit we think it is called a salak, ok, but we all decided one taste was enough.   The skin is very much like a snake skin, brown in colour.