Live from Bali!

Hi Blogger Friends,

I hope that everyone is doing well. I quickly skimmed through my G reader and saw some good news, some bad news, some still waiting news and some hopeful news. I didn't comment, but I was too curious to know what's going on not to read up!

So, there are 5 days left of the vacay and I am feeling great. Let me tell you, it wasn't 12 hours past arrival that I'd totally forgotten about the 24 hour plane ride. Before we landed they showed a video titled "Bali-The Healing Paradise" and I knew we were in the right place.

We have had an amazing beach portion of the trip-2 days at the luxury (free) resort and then 5 days on a small island-Gili Air-off the coast of Lombok, where I did 7 scuba dives, much snorkeling, sunset viewing every night and waking up for sunrise every morning. You can walk around the entire island in about 1.5 hours which we did every night and there are no cars or motorbikes, only horsecarts, bikes and your own two feet. It's fabulous I tell you.
Oh, but there's no fresh water, so bathing in salt water for 6 days makes you a bit..dry and salty. Not so nice.

Now we are back on Bali and have spent 2 our of 5 days in the cultural and artistic center of Ubud. We walked about with our bags and found a steal of a room for $15/night, hot water, fan included and breakfast brought right to your porch chair and table. It's beautiful weather and no need for A/C. The building faces the famous rice paddies and all day and night the ducks waddle by eating whatever they can in the paddies. Then along sunset time, the duck herder comes by and puts them in their pen for the night. The guest house owner brings us tea to our porch around 5:30pm and we sit in our chairs and watch the ducks go by. It's quite a life I tell you.

After all of the salt and sand on Gili Air we did a Javenese Princess spa treatment yesterday--4 hours and I had an hour massage, a salt scrub, my body rinsed and lathered up with yogurt, a soak in a fragrant tub filled with every kind of flower petal you can imagine, a facial, a peel, a face massage, a mani/pedi complete with foot massage, leg massage, hand massage and arm massage followed by a special treatment cream of avacado and aloe vera for my hair. At one point I had 4 different women doing 4 different things to me and it was a little overwhelming. Bonus is they grow everything in their garden and so it's all 100% natural. All for $60. A girl could get used to this!

The shopping is the most amazing I've ever seen. I'm not that much of a shopper and am so overwhelmed by all there is to choose from I haven't bought a thing. I will...but it's really all so much. I could seriously go into just about every store and say yes to one of every thing. It would be a dream to furnish a house from the good here. Oh la la.
There is beauty everywhere here and it's incredible to see how important rituals and spiritual offerings make up the pace of the day. Just going down the street, you are constantly stepping over little baskets of offerings b/c they are placed everywhere.
As far as an entire town goes, I've never been somewhere so astethically pleasing as Ubud.

Unfortunately, K has been bitten by the traveler's poo bug and is a sick little bunny today. So, of course, I brush my teeth with the tap water and she gets PufferPoo. I've been doing Gatorade runs all day and staying close by. We've got some Ci.pro with us which she's started and a bit of immod.ium, so hopefully after 24 hours of this she'll come out on the other side ready to hike up a volcano or take a trek through the rice paddies in the countryside.

I feel good and a million miles removed from just a couple of weeks ago. I took the most challenging yoga class today and have meditated for hours on the beach this past week. It has been so relaxing and decompressing and just what I needed.

It's been so nice not to temp or be 'waiting' for anything related to the TTC. Even so, while we aren't talking about that--we are always talking about traveling with a child and how amazing it is going to be.
K wants to take a sabbattical for a year and travel with the baby...I think that's a mighty fine idea especially because I'm going to get pregnant again when I get home. Oh yes I am.

xoxo
Puffer in Bali