Thursday, September 30, 2010

gado gado

This week, with the workload ebbing slightly, I got up to these adventures:



1. climbing
After a terribly difficult time tracking down their contact information (I think I'm spoiled by how easy the internet makes everything), I finally got in touch with the Gibbon climbing club.

I rode my motorbike from Ubud to Kuta to climb on Monday evening. This took an hour, and the traffic was crazy. The roads were swarming with motorbikes weaving all over the place. I eventually figured out a strategy: ride slow, drift to the back of the pack of bikes, where the families with five people on a bike are, and ride just close enough to the person in front that nobody tries to cut in, but far enough away that there's some stopping distance.

I made it to Kuta alright, and met Dani and Ika at a climbing wall in Kuta after only an hour of getting lost in the city. Ika is a tiny woman who is a deceptively good climber. Dani used to be a forest ranger (?) or something like that and now teaches climbing full time. I climbed a bit, and talked to them a lot.

The neatest thing I learnt was that the Indonesian government created a national climbing federation, and sponsors a climbing team from each district in the country. It also built facilities in quite a few of the regions. I met Dani and Ika behind a firehouse, where the government had built a 20 metre (60 foot) wall, a 15 metre wall, and a bunch of smaller boulder-walls. Pretty awesome and pretty out of character that the Indonesian government would do this.

We got along really well, I'm going to try to go climbing on some real rocks with them this weekend.



2. green school
Ewa and I visited green school, an alternative / startup school (grades K-12 (!!)) in Bali, that is built almost entirely from bamboo, and emphasises experiential-over-theoretical learning. They are currently working towards IB accredition. Central to their mission are a set of scholarships: one fifth of their student body is Balinese children on full rides.

The school is also designed to have a low impact and great environmental awareness -- kids learn about cultivation, planting fields of rice and vegetables, and study the ecosystem that is all around them and often walks or flies right into their classroom. The school is also design to be a redistribution system, charging full tuition for most, to subsidise Balinese students and programs for local schools and kids, and raising money for similar ends by selling incredibly beautiful bamboo furniture and bamboo houses, to rich expats, for designer-brand prices. That's fine by me!

John Hardy, founder, says his idea is for these Balinese kids to completely skip out on the traditional streams of education, come out green, go to the best schools for environment and public policy and urban planning, and come back to fix Bali and Indonesia. It's an interesting idea that will be proven with time. The architecture here is just stunning.



















The cafe there also bakes the best brownie I have ever tasted. From someone whose sweet tooth fell out early in life, this is very high praise.






















3. mepantigan
I've started doing Mepantigan, a very young martial art (7 years) founded by a gentleman named Putu Witsen. He also teaches other martial arts and outdoorsy stuff at green school.

Mepantigan is great. It's got elements of other fighting styles in it, but focuses on throws and prohibits striking. Fighters wrestle in muddy mud pits or rice fields (where landings are soft), and are applauded for aggression, politeness and friendliness (!!). The folks who do it are all swell.

Mepantigan as a dramatic art incorporates painting, music, firebreathing, acrobatics, comedy, you name it. People love this stuff. Someone once sponsored Putu to go to Denmark once to teach and perform.













This is what it looks like. I'm not in that photo nor did I take it, but I'll do my best to do either of those things soon.

So far, it's great. I've done Mepantigan twice and am getting the hang of being safely thrown (quite fun actually), and safely throwing a person to the ground (Putu says I need to be more aggressive. That figures. The other thing I'm really terrible at is making warcries of effort when throwing someone, which is encouraged, which everyone else does really well).

Rolling in mud is the perfect thing to do on a hot day. I feel like a water buffalo: content.

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