This morning as walked out of the shower in my apparently secluded, private villa in Ubud, a smiley toothless Balinese woman bumbled onto my balcony right in front of me to lay an offering by the front steps of my room. Not long later came a sneaky chicken that pecked up all the rice from the offering, then legged it hastily as a dog came excitedly chasing after it.
Not long later the toothless woman was back on my balcony with a yoghurt container nailed to a long plank which she used to extract papayas from the trees lining my view.
She grinned and waved a papaya at me by way of offering.
After the morning’s interactions I jumped on my scooter, also with an offering on it,
including a fish shaped cracker that had fallen off the handlebars and onto the floor of the scooter. My scooter is no longer gluten free. I pulled open the gate and scootered out only to find that construction had occurred on my driveway in the last hour and there was a wet concrete ramp and a huge pile of loose dirt barring my way. I looked around and found a toothless man who dropped his wheelbarrow, jumped on my scooter and drove it straight through the wet cement, skidded around through the dirt pile and safely over to the other side so I could go on my way.
On my scootery way to the coworking space I passed a guy with a huge aircon unit strapped to the back of his scooter,
then suddenly came to a halt in front of a flip-flop wearing man standing in the middle of the road flapping his hand at me and the rest of the traffic. I looked around him puzzled to see a man heaving a rope and a dude with a chainsaw, and then suddenly with a crash a huge tree fell across the road a metre away from the traffic. 4 men with no helmets on ran onto the road with chainsaws and proceeded to rapidly cut it into small bits and drag it off the road while the traffic backed up both ways and some brave scooterers mounted the smaller branches in an effort to whiz by.
This evening I went to Coco Supermarket to buy a teaspoon only to find they don’t have such a thing, only big spoons.
What I did find were counterfeit Bose Soundlink speakers for $30, a T-shirt with the words “Sex instructor. First lesson free” with a stick-people-having-sex diagram on it and rap music blaring “F them all” in English over the speakers of this huge commercial Indonesian supermarket.
