Wandering Browns

Gamelan! Yay! Our last night in Bali, we hired a babysitter and went out for dinner at the hotel. Every night, they have a Balinese night market, giant buffet, and cultural performance. Typically it is held outside in this cool terraced area at the hotel, but since it was off-and-on raining all afternoon, it was moved to the Watercourt restaurant. Because we have been living at Hyatt hotels instead of a house this year, we were presented with special butterfly VIP pins and were shown to a very comfortable cushioned booth right in the middle to best view the stage area. The buffet spread was overwhelming! There was a ton of meat, which made Austin very happy, but also a good array of salads, including the traditional Indonesian salad Gado-Gado with peanut sauce, of which I ate way too much. There were different rice and noodle dishes as well and potatoes, which I had not eaten in quite a long time! Austin liked having pork, since that is hard to find on Java, and I enjoyed eating

View in the morning when we woke up Beach right outside our door I'm searching for words to describe Bali. Paradise, relaxation, and rich, deep culture come to mind. Since finding out we were traveling to Indonesia, Bali has been on my short list of places we MUST go. I had a deep visceral longing to see this place. I'm glad that my dreams came true. It was a process involving ever changing Austin's work and clients' schedules and ultimately involved booking plane tickets the day of, only to find out that our flight out of Cilacap (only a few flights a day, only to Jakarta) was not at the time that the person from Austin's work booking tickets had told us, which led us to waiting three hours without air conditioning in a small room that passes for the Cilacap airport,  having to reschedule/change/miss our first connecting flight to Bali and hop on a different flight a few hours later. It involved switching airports in Jakarta and trusting a taxi van that