Karma over my house.

Every time we return to Bali Sara and I venture further off the beaten path.

Firstly – we never stay down on the popular beaches since we share an allergy for drunken surfers. We prefer the hour’s drive from the airport into the foothills of the volcano – staying in Ubud. Ubud is considered the artist’s heart of the island and has been made doubly famous by the book and subsequent movie – Eat Pray Love.

So, instead of shouting inebriated Aussies with fresh tattoos careening around you’ve got the fifty-something yoga moms strolling beatifically about with their mats rolled up under their arms looking to hitch a ride on the Kundalini express. As I said to my friend Larry, certain establishments there reek of Namaste.

So, what do you do when Ubud, a town of about a dozen roads begins to get claustrophobic? You point your motorbike deeper up into the mountains and then down again to the little seaside village of Amed. Here I saw no surf worthy of boards, just fishing enclaves and coral reefs. We decided to make this side trip at the encouragement of Larry and at the discouragement of Rai. Larry knew we enjoyed a challenge (and I think he was happy to have us out of his hair for a couple days while he continued re-supplying City Buddha – see previous poet) but Rai was worried about making the winding hilly journey during the rainy season. We opted for the adventure and promised that slow and easy with breaks for cloudbursts would be our agenda.

The ride through the mountains is fairly hair-raising at times through switchbacks and unguardrailed drops, big red and green trucks careening by – motor scooters packed with goods for the cities and the occasional monkey on the side of the road. I decided the drivers of red trucks were much more reckless than the drivers of the green ones. We were warned to be on the lookout for mudslides by more than a few folks as we embarked on our trek. Not quite white knuckle riding – but there was no leeway for daydreaming or sightseeing as I piloted our bike along.

The trip took about three and a half hours and luckily for us the rain didn’t hit until the last few kilometers before we reached our destination. A little ocean side tiki hutted resort bucolically named Good Karma. The rain lasted maybe a half hour and then stayed away during our two night stay.

Even though the joint sported the Good Karma moniker it was not drenched in the enlightenment for a price soaked trappings I find myself turning my nose up to. Hammocked in the crescent of a black sand beach (black because of volcanic rock) GK house a couple dozen thatch roofed huts, a nice little restaurant, more chickens than you can shake a stick at and decent snorkeling right outside your front step. There was nothing to do. Nothing except relax, hang out, snorkel, watch the fishermen come back with their catch, hike around the hills, and eat sweet batter fried bananas drizzled with honey for dessert. So – that’s what we did.

Thus, if you’re looking for Peace (and quiet) that doesn’t require twisting your body into a slipknot I could not over recommend unwinding for a day or two at Good Karma – it’s worth the ride.

Buying in Bali

“Somebody grab me a Coke in a bottle!”

Outside the temperature is pushing 90 degrees Fahrenheit with humidity hovering at the same digits. At just eight degrees south from the equator, Bali has virtually one weather report – hot with chance of rain. The moist heat wraps around you like one of the warm towels the wasp waisted Thai Air flight attendants hand you before serving you breakfast on the flight over. One can’t get much further away from Cleveland Ohio in January than the Indonesian Island of Bali – in fact, fly any further and you’re headed home again – the place is literally on the other side of the world.

The guy demanding the Coke is my friend Larry Collins and we are shopping.

Larry and his too good for him wife, the Balinese born Rai (pronounced rye – like the bread) together own City Buddha - a shop in the hip Coventry Village neighborhood of Cleveland Heights. They are on their yearly buying mission for the store and I and my sweetie Sara Holbrook have tagged along. This isn’t your gum popping teenage girl “Shop til you Drop” T-shirted excursion – it’s a whole new ballgame when the professional shoppers you are cohorting with are not metaphorically christened.

The two have notebook pages of items they need to replenish back at City Buddha – saris, carved skulls, bracelets, rings, drums, bandanas, Buddha busts, hair ties, incense, goo gaws, tchotchkes, trinkets and sundries. These lists, along with Skype calls back to the shop and discerning eyes for anything new propels this duo through the thick heat. There is no one location shopping here – we travel to and fro across the countryside on motorbikes stopping in and visiting the supplier network that Larry and Rai have set up over the years.

We pay a call on the “skull guy” the wood carver whose shop is located on the road that climbs up to the island’s volcano. On a return trip to the area, one of the recurrent downpours turned the road into an instant river threatening to wash the Collins’ motorbike down the hill. Luckily Larry and another man were able to chase the thing down before it disappeared over a cliff.

Larry whips out his pda and starts checking his orders from last year, conversing with the shop owner in Indonesian or maybe Balinese – I don’t know which – I just know it’s pretty incongruous to see this short and stout Jewish guy from Cleveland blithely chatting away in the strange tongue.

“How did these sell last year?” Larry asks Rai. This is how it works – Larry staring at his list or the small screen in his palm occasionally shouting out to his wife for clarification of language or the attributes of a potential purchase and Rai – much more often than not – tossing the info back from the top of head. “These sold out before the summer,” or “we still have a bunch in the warehouse.”

One impression that dawns early is: This is work.

We’re not on some souvenir hunt – we are restocking an entire store for at least a year. Supplier after supplier we park our motorbikes outside and Larry and Rai place their orders, scope out new items, haggle over prices and endure the random weirdness that crosses one’s path in a third world country. Sara and I do our best to try and stay out of the couple’s way. We become experts at reading their behavior like a pair of zoologists chronicling the hunting techniques of komodo dragons.

If Larry doesn’t sit down we only have a few minutes before we move on. If Larry sits and Rai is browsing the shop we have fifteen, twenty minutes, if they both sit and start looking at lists and pdas we have thirty to forty-five minutes. Sara and I learn to wrap our own shopping around this rubric ducking into adjacent shops while keeping our eyes on the door of the place Larry and Rai are working. Sometimes one of us stations themselves on the sidewalk while the other explores in order not to hold the show up when our hoists decide to move on to the next destination. Time is of the essence – except when it is not.

The concept of time is a bit more fluid here in Bali. Deadlines and appointments just don’t carry the same weight they do in the west. I blame this on the lack of winter, cold weather teaches one to move quickly. To finish a task before you freeze your butt off. Whether the job is getting from one building to another in frigid air or getting the grain in the silo before the first frost winter is a demarcating line that can only be ignored at grave peril. Well – at eight degrees from the equator there is no Winter – no Fall, no Spring – there is a rainy and dry season (we’re here in the rainy season – see floating away motorbike above) but they are a poor excuse for real seasons - Seasons which distill a sense of time and urgency that the lovely people of the tropics don’t seem to possess.

So, working with a deadline as Larry and Rai do is a recipe for frustration. As quaint and beautiful a tropical paradise like Bali can be – trying to conduct business there within the miasma of a bureaucracy devised by a people with no concept of exigency can be a hair pulling experience. This phenomenon is not solely Balinese – Sara and I have seen this same laissez faire attitude in Morocco and Borneo – leading me again to think it has something to do with cold weather.

Even so, during the week and a half that we spent with Rai and Larry they ticked off a good portion of their to-do list and by all reports they’re still going strong. Minor setbacks in the form of a nasty fall Rai took on a wet tile floor in a multi-tiered market (liability does not exist in Indonesia) – the insane madness of trying to re-title an automobile – the creeping of a Chinese firewall into the Balinese internet – a neighbor’s dead chicken – minor-league copyright infringement – power outages –and disappearing drivers notwithstanding – this year’s excursion looks to this outside observer as heading towards success.

In fact, it was so much fun Sara and I are already plotting our return visit next year.

The Donor died on the Table

Okay, I’ve been gradually upgrading my road bike over the years. Every season I add a new component – maybe some handlebars, new gearing, pedals. Well this winter I finally got around to buying  a new frame. So the bike I bought six years ago is officially gone. There are no original pieces to that first road bike I bought. So – I may have taken a half dozen years – but I have a new bike.

 Here’s the donor bike – the Trek frame is the only original component and it’s day is here.

Max came home for Christmas so I waited for him to help with migrating everything to the new carbon fiber frame.

Brakes are installed as is the crank – there was a bit of tricky threading for the shifters and we toasted a couple lines but got it right in the end.

We got pretty close with the derailleurs but the chain seemed a bit to sloppy – so we took the thing to the LBS to get a pro mechanic’s opinion. Amazingly enough – he agreed with us.

Weighs in at just over 17lbs.

And here it is after a successful ride to the top of the street and back amidst some giant snowflakes. The first dry day though I’m bundling up and giving it a proper break in ride. (I removed the extra red decals the previous owner had installed. I prefer an understated style – that way when I get passed by some 19 year old kid on a mountain bike I may just not look too foolish.

Dazed and Confucius: Western Academy of Beijing

Confucius say: Well, this Confucius didn’t say much of anything because he was a statue on the grounds of the Western Academy of Beijing, where Sara and I spent eight days working with the Elementary, Middle and High School scholars plus an after school teacher session.

Librarian extraordinaire, Trish McNair – a short cropped redheaded Canuck who has seemingly harnessed the energy of the Calgary Stampede  - shepherded us through our visit, finding us when we were lost, making us espressos when we began to get bleary eyed and never complaining (too loud) when we asked for another print-out of our schedule.

Having thoroughly author visitized the elementary school the preceding week, Sara and I tackled the 6th, 7th, and 8th grade Monday through Thursday and then moved over to the high school on Friday.

We worked on figurative language, memoir and definition poems with the students and presented on vocabulary acquisition and writing across the curriculum for the teachers. The students then had an opportunity to perform their or other’s work at an after school Coffee House Poetry Reading that saw way more hot chocolate being consumed than coffee.

Friday we moved over to the high school and presented on public speaking and the politics poetry during a global issues conference entitled Speak Out. The morning keynote was given in the gymnasium by the US ambassador to China, Gary Locke. Which was cool – but the real highlight was the international lunch where all the different nationalities comprising the student body of WAB present native cuisine for the epicurean pleasure of students, staff and presenters. Extra super yum.

As the (book)Worm turns

In Beijing there is a funky  little bookshop with giant ambitions run by an ex pat named Alex Pearson. Our librarian friend and hostess Trish suggested that we might like scoping the place out so Sara and I swung by and had a look around and a bit of lunch at The Bookworm. well as we perused the upcoming events at the joint we saw that a troupe of Polish performance poets were coming into town as part of a Spoke n Word tour. I mentioned to Trish about how sometimes Sara and I forget about our adult poet voices when we are on the road visiting schools. We get so wrapped up in making sure we provide good lessons for the kids that we never think to look for performance opportunities for ourselves in adult venues in the cities we visit.

Well Trish hopped on this and called her friend Alex which led to a dinner date for all four of us at the bookstore. Alex told us that the Poles had hoped to invite some Chinese performance poets to join their set but were unable to find any. we offered our services, she checked out our credentials and forwarded them on to the Polish bards who then said sure, they’d love to have us jump in on their set.

So serendipity baby – Sara and I landed a gig in Beijing. To top it off – a bunch of the teachers we met at the International School of Beijing made our reading the cap off to a gals day out in the city.  It was fun for us to have the opportunity to perform some of our adult material for a change and to do so in the coolest bookstore in Beijing – well it just doesn’t get any better does it?

Check out the link to this bookstore and the literary festival that Alex puts on – it’s pretty amazing. in the meantime here are some pics from the reading.

Three wheels are better than none – I guess

What looks like a glorified hotdog cart, has three wheels, a motor and smells like gin? The little taxi contraption that Sara and I got into after our walk around the Forbidden City.

Even though we successfully managed to ride the subway down to the Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City we decided for the sake of Sara’s legs we would hop a cab back. Now, as is par for most tourist destinations there were cabs waiting to take folks anywhere they wanted to go ~ for a price. See hacks like to grab fares from popular sightseeing destinations sans meter – negotiating an unusually exorbitant price.

We had about a 20 minute ride, a little less than six kilometers. The first cabbie quoted us something like 150 Yuan which equals almost 25 bucks US. Well it was also about three times what I thought we should pay so we politely told him to go packing. We whipped out our map and decided to walk a bit further away from the touristy area and try and find a cab with a meter.

Half a block away, while I’m walking looking at my map, one of these three wheeled little tin boxes pulls up and the driver asks us where we are going. Mind you though, he’s speaking Mandarin and we English but I show him the major landmark near the apartment we are borrowing for the weekend rom our librarian friend Trish ~ Workers Stadium. He gives us a thumbs up and I ask how much. 50 he says – perfect exactly what I figured would be fair so we squeeze into the back and off we go.

It was once we were in the tin can confines of the three wheeled dervish that we both noticed our driver smelled very strongly of adult beverages. He was either hammered or riding with a bucket of formaldehyde sloshing between his legs. We careened through traffic – our horn beeping like a flock of Canadian geese headed south. Sara commented that it was probably a really good thing we were facing backwards.

Thank Buddha we arrived at our destination in one piece. but then when we gave him his fifty he tried to tell us that he meant fifty for each of us – he wanted a hundred now. I told him “Boo Yow” which I am pretty sure means NO Want and we hopped out of of his tri wheeled coffin. He didn’t even hesitate as he looped around and swerved back in the direction we had just come.