Still, I'm thinking of the Ubud where the road is narrow, houses, shops and warungs (roadside eats) creep onto the sidewalk (that's barely there at all) and vines, bushes and trees and vegetation of all kinds grows over the buildings, trying to take over the street and block out the sky. Behind the buildings, it's thick jungle, or swaths of rice fields. Everyone here is brown (I need to work on being browner).
The architecture here is amazing. Houses have these awesome pitched roofs that slope on all sides but end in a flat top -- sometimes in tile and sometimes with straw, and sit on a flat concrete or raised earth slab, with very square, compact designs. Multi-storey houses keep their awesome roofs, and are stepped, a little bit like Japanese houses or Chinese temples. Families live in these awesome little compounds where houses sit next to each other on their platforms, with little prayer altar arranged all around them. Any space that isn't a house or an altar is groomed as a garden, with stone slabs to walk on, grass, and flowers and decorative bushes. Chickens, cats and sometimes rabbits run around the garden, children play, and brightly coloured birds sit in cages. The whole compound is walled in, sometimes with intricate patterns on the walls, and ornately carved entryways. It's charming and intensely beautiful I'm really not doing its beauty justice with words.
people live here! real people live here. Isn't it beautiful? I don't think any of the people around these parts are particularly rich, but their family compounds are all just really nice, a lot of carved wood and nice artwork. My theory is that so many people live in the same compound that the combined amount of money they can spend on it is quite substantial, and that they've lived in it for so many generations that they've had plenty of time to put some shine on it.
People are really friendly and smile a lot, people I've had extended conversations with are also extremely nice and really interesting. It's funny how in Cambridge, it was rare for me to meet someone who was local, whilst in Ubud, it's rare for me to meet someone who isn't. People also ride scooters around town with crazy abandon, weaving and overtaking all over the road, riding in the wrong direction on two-way and one-way streets. The food is very goreng (fried), but tasty, well portioned and nicely arranged, and the weather is a few degrees cooler, because Ubud is a little higher up in the hills, than the rest of Bali.
The first evening, I walked to a little hole in the wall warung, the kind of place the local boy at my homestay tells me he would go to eat at, and I walked by a small terraced paddy field tucked away in someone's back yard next to a plot of bananas and a little pen with hundreds of little ducklings in it, coconut trees shading everything. How's that for an urban garden?
Ubud is in grave danger! Already there's a Starbucks on the main road, with word that a McDonalds is on the way. Most of the shops in town are very shiny and polished, may selling upmarket clothes and perfumes and things that you could find anywhere else, really. There's even a fish spa, a nutty Chinese or Japanese idea where the customer puts his or her feet into a tank and fish nibble on them. In pandering to western tastes, Ubud is losing its architecture, its local food and all its charm and culture, fast.
I blame it on the tourists. I think tourism is a great way to bring money into a country and create business, but it's sad what lousy tourists can do to a place.
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