my last update was sent when we just landed back in bali after summer holidays in europe. here we are, 2 months older and wiser (and better looking of course!) – a few things have happened since and are still happening.
have a read or scroll for pics!
we enjoyed our ‘old’ house for the last couple of weeks, making the best of our time there. puppies managed to kill their first and let’s hope last prey (poor chick..), lola went white-water rafting to celebrate her buddy’s birthday, dan enjoyed his new hobby – dirt motorbiking..
Midlife crisis (-:
dom was braving challenges of grade 8 with all his might and i did my usual mix of mothering, housekeeping and yoga (that sounds rather boring!) and continued on my journey of learning indonesian language. we said good-bye to our old home with a beautiful ceremony and moved on!
Saying good-byes to our beautiful home #1
ever since we moved in here our new house has been a source of entertainment. don’t get me wrong – the house is beautiful, we love it and i’m not complaining! it’s just for those of you who tend to ask how are we spending our days..
Rice paddy view
electricity is off on regular basis, so we enjoy a candle lit dinner regularly. not so much fun when you are worried about food in your fridge.. water was also being switched off quite often – so we decided to take things into our hands. “how we drilled the well” could be a topic of a 4-page article so let me just say it was noisy, frustrating and very educational. although it looked like it was never going to be finished it’s done! there are other minor sources of fun like leaking swimming pool and leaking roof (with wet season upon us..), regularly breaking washing machine, termites eating anything and everything.. there was also family of mice (big mice.. wait.. are they called rats?) living here but our brave warrior mia chased them out in day 1. now she is back to chasing poor geckos. there is also absolutely stunning view of rice paddies which start at the edge of our garden, few volcanoes (more about that later..) in the backyard, peace and quiet only interrupted by crickets, frogs and birds..
New garden
hummingbirds drinking from our lovely flowers, butterflies, geckos, even a resident monitor lizard and our super bunch of friendly dogs. only a few snake sightings so far. i think i haven’t mentioned we have a new dog – our house came with a delightful three-legged local dog spotty who is adored and bothered by our black pups all the time. also with the house we have acquired a few balinese coming and going and taking care of the house – getting to know them i feel more and more enchanted and sometimes slightly frustrated). they are super nice but sometimes i don’t understand them at all. very grateful to our balinese goddess suma for daily ceremonies, i believe without her this house would have fallen apart long time ago.
New addition
animals are certainly a big part of our life now. soon after we moved in we realised no one remembers when spotty the new dog got his last vaccine – and we were told he was super difficult to get out of house – so i have decided to call the vet for a house visit. there were couple of other issues – our cat also needed a vaccine, misty (one of our black pups) had an infected wound on her leg (spotty bit her.. but that was the second day of our stay here, she well deserved it for munching on his food! now they are best palls), everybody needed de-worming and we had a REALLY SCARY tick invasion here (one morning dan and i killed around 200 of them – no kidding). guess what.. the well drilling was not happening for days but on that day of course the drill guy appeared out of nowhere. so understandably by the time the vets arrived, everybody was half deaf and super nervous. you can’t imagine the mess – barking, running, trying to escape, biting… the drill guy laughing.. to sum it up, there were some failures: cat hiding on the roof, no vaccine; spotty managed to bite the vet in the back and we were told that by killing (squashing) the ticks we have actually multiplied them – their blood contains huge amount of eggs.. well.. we live and learn. there were also some accomplishments: spotty vaccinated, misty’s leg treated, medicine against ticks and worms given and spotty managed to bite the vet (i’m putting this to the accomplishments as well – he was protecting misty who was yelling and refusing to get treated 😉 so no luck of excitement here!
Tired (and spoiled) huntress
to avoid future dealings with someone else’s house (i guess that was the motivation if i remember well..) some time ago we have joined an “eco village” project here in bali – where bunch of people from school decided to build low impact houses. the project was slow to begin with as finding the right land wasn’t easy – but things started to happen now and we can already see the foundation of our tiny cob house. let’s see how that goes! starting to wonder how on earth we and our 20 animals would fit in..
school has been great as usually, we even have an exciting addition of 2 slovak families! looks like i need to brush up my drinking skills.. and our school communication doesn’t cease to bring smile on my face – with requests from the realm of “hi, are there any hypnotherapists in our school community” – being immediately answered “yes of course!” – coming regularly (-; dominik was supposed to attend a 4-days camp at the beginning of october but that was when things started to get interesting..
as you probably know, indonesia lies on the so-called ring of fire – the most geologically active part of the world. until recently we have experienced an occasional earthquake, admired volcanoes from afar (and climbed one) but other than that we really didn’t feel anything special. that changed couple of weeks ago when one of the sleeping volcanoes in bali started waking up. the alert level was raised to 3 and soon after to highest level 4 – imminent eruption. it was (and still is) very interesting to observe what started to happen – in the community, in the world and most importantly – within us. balinese villages on the foot of the mountain were quickly evacuated (the 1963 eruption that came without warning cost lives of around 1.500 villagers) and it was heartening to see how immediately communities – local, expat and tourist – reacted. donations and help poured in. parents and staff from our school has shown their generous hearts and incredible organisational skills. people who had to leave their homes are one of the poorest in bali – far away from touristy kuta and ubud. the little they have they had to leave behind including their animals. for a moment it looked like the eruption would happen within hours – but here we are, 4 weeks later, still on the highest alert level, volcano fuming, small tremors happening daily.. people still misplaced. and there is no way to tell when it blows up, what will be the extent of the eruption, how the island will be affected.. in the times when we humans (especially in the west) feel like we can control everything including the nature it is a great learning of letting go of our ideas of how things should be, of our never ending planning and control. it is also very educational to look at ourselves – our fears, conceptions, how do we act, how we prepare ourselves.. in the west we somehow seem to be more removed from the elements and natural disasters, things like this always seem to be happening somewhere else, we just watch the news on TV. funny how people react in different ways – some packed and left, some did a lot of research and stocked up on necessities, some helped others and some partied and pretended nothing was happening. the whole volcano situation has another aspect, perhaps the most important for the locals – spiritual. mount Agung is the most revered of bali volcanoes as according to balinese the spirits of their ancestors and gods reside there. bali most important temple, mother temple besakih is also on the mountain. daily offerings and prayers are taking place to calm the natural force down. it is a very special time here in bali. on the other hand it is fascinating to observe how media reacted to the threat on the island of gods (and tourists). lot of catastrophic coverage, fake news (hope i am permitted to use this ‘favourite’ expression) and lot of nonsense going on in global media. we are here to see how the situation develops.
The crater of Mt.Agung
in the meantime we managed to visit australia during the autumn break for the first time ever and celebrated our kids’ BIG birthdays there – but more about that next time.
take good care of yourselves and your loved ones and drop me a line if you feel like it.
