And now India is happening! The second you step outside here, BOOM, it’s full-on. Bali was refined and polite, like a gentle stream trickling through the forest, but India is immediately a rushing river full of all the extremes of life, filth and transcendence all swirling together. The flights on Air Asia were just shy of abysmal. I don’t expect a free meal on such a cheap flight, but charging for water is inhuman; even cattle in transport get free water occasionally. Not being able to put your seats back is pretty unpleasant on a four-hour flight (we were in …
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tourist
Tonight is my last night in Bali; tomorrow we fly to Chennai, then on Wednesday we’ll head to Sri Ramanasramam in Tiruvannamalai, Tamil Nadu for a week before finding an apartment and settling in for a few months. The last few days have been pretty trying. I spent most of the week trying to hunker down on work, since I’ll be on retreat next week, and was looking forward to seeing some more of Bali over the weekend, possibly taking a few nights overnight up north and seeing a non-touristy part of the island. Saturday I woke up feeling really …
There’s a good article on Matador Network that came out last month, titled “We need to stop pretending travel will fix all of our problems”, with some very valid points. The article looks at, first of all, the motivation behind world travel: We Millennials grew during an explosion of American consumerism, and we saw that acquiring more and more things did not make people happier. So we decided instead to acquire experiences. There’s some research that this will, in fact, make us happier… But traveling more has not meant that millennials are not still consumers like their parents. It just means they consume different things. …
It’s almost the end of my third week in Bali, and there’s been lots of odds and ends to report. One was an inevitability: I got pretty sick last weekend, as one does in tropical places, the night after my horseback ride. I don’t really know exactly what it was I ate and can wave vaguely at a few possible suspects. My digestive system was in full revolt on Saturday night, and I spent all of Sunday weak and exhausted and mostly sleeping, but then Monday I was surprisingly chipper and back to normal, just being super, super cautious with …
I’ve spent most of the past few days getting back into work. I find Hubud a very easy place to be. People are pretty friendly and everyone likes talking about travel – most of us have that in common, though there’s certainly plenty of local Balinese coworkers too. There’s a variety of spaces to work in whether you feel the need for productive quiet or a lively space where you can gab with your neighbours. There’s a tempting cafeteria, and some beanbags to flake out in. I like to set up near the window facing the garden, even though there’s …