Balinese Massages, Groceries and Visa Extensions
September 27, 2022 • Ubud, Bali
Hello my faraway loves. I miss sharing days with you. I wake up in your future and I fall asleep as you open your eyes. I’m experiencing for the first time the feeling of being truly far away from home. Until now my greatest time difference form home and family has been 10hrs; still living in the same day, the sun is just in a different part of the sky. Now, my loved ones live in the past, a full day behind me. I say good morning and goodnight in the same breath. This is the most distant and disconnected I’ve ever felt from them, truly divided by the size of the glove. There is a small, somewhat inconvenient, window of time in which we are both awake to share our stories and smile into each other’s voices. Voice messages are left for later listening and life, my day in their future, goes on alone. I feel compassion for a human in a distant space, light years away from home planet, months of travel between here and there, and a love string strong enough to hold the two people in two places together.
I stare at feet. Their toes are beautifully aligned with the foot. Healthy spread out wide foot bones that have never been bound is shoes. Bare soles on the earth and flipping free in sandals these Balinese feet walk by me on the street happy as feet can be.
I received a traditional Balinese massage for the first time today. Before the massage my feet were bathed in a bowl of water with floating rose petals. During the massage I stared down through the face hole at a stone bowl filled with plumeria flowers) and appreciated the Balinese feet walking barefoot on the stone floor around me. She stood on the table and pressed firmly into my softening body. With my ears closed in deepening relaxation I prayed and asked why I am here. I kept hearing these words repeat in my head… “Receive receive receive.” After the massage, I floated out into a warm air, blissful, and slowly sipped the ginger tea and nibbles fresh papaya.
Two weeks of restaurants and I’m thrilled to be cooking for myself again. “Bintang”, the local grocery store in the old magical jungle part of Ubud carried so much variety, many brands I recognize from home and only one thing on my shopping list was not ticked off… protein powder. Their health food / supplements aisle was nonexistent. My fitness routine is on rest mode. Fresh fruit a plenty! Bali grown chocolate, coffee, tea, banana chips…. it all grows right here!
Beside the supermarket is an exquisite cafe shop called “Dharma”. This fancy coffee health food boutique store broke my a big 100,000 IDR bill when I purchased a square of ”Ubud Raw” chocolate. I nibbled the rich dark sweetness on the sidewalk while I waited for my scooter driver to arrive.
The scooter ride home through the jungle air was warm, soft and relaxing…scooters are a highlight of my day because I get to soar through the wind and let go of control for a moment. On this particular ride, I held a bag of vegetables in my lap with that raw chocolate half chewed in my back pocket. I was dropped of and ran straight into the house to cook a simple dish… fried onions, potatoes and egg…smooshed inside a halved avocado that’s filled with hummus.
Now I’m kicking up my feet on the balance listening to jungle bugs and frogs, half finished paintings on the floor. Also, today I applied for a visa extension so I’ll be spending at least another month in Bali! I paid extra to have a travel agent take care of the paperwork for me. Total cost for expedited agency assisted visa extension: 1,300,000 IDR — the process normally takes 8 business days. I paid extra to have it done in 3 because they take your passport away from you and I want to keep it on my person, never separated from it. So to send it away to the immigration office for 3 days vs 8 days made it worth the express fees. When I’m traveling, that passport is my ticket home so it’s my most precious possession…that and my ticket and money. “Passport, ticket, money.” My parents might as well have tattooed this phrase on my body at birth. Every time I leave home a little further than the usual distance, I hear my dad’s voice singing this little mantra. “Passport, ticket and money!” — everything else you can buy when you get there. It’s really all you need.
Love & Rainbows, Cha Wilde