After a woozy arrival in Legian, Bali on Thursday night, we met Allegra and Talia for an egg and rice (nasi goreng) breakfast at our hotel. We took a cab to meet Aryani, Scott, and their family gang at the superchic Laksmana Villas. There, after Aryani gave us a tour of the place, I had a second breakfast of a shiny danish and more excellent balinese coffee.

The group of us, now numbering around 12 or 13, took some hired-for-the day cars to the Sekehe Barong Sila Budaya. The Barong is a dance performnce set to gamelan music which illustrates a chain of posessions, devourings, and ascencions to Heaven leading to a kind of fanatic religious event where the participants go into a trance while they simulate stabbing themselves in the chest with wooden swords and a holy man sprinkles water on them. It was truly an amazing event, and the best part was a big four-dancing-legged tigercreature called a Barong who was fierce and terribly cute.

Scott and Aryani needed to have a wedding photo shoot, so we drove to the Four Seasons resort and wandered around in unreal manicured beauty while they did their thing. The roof of the resort is composed of a stone patio that kind of floats on a giant round reflecting pool filled with little black fish. Past the edges of the pool is only the void and then the trees of a public park, from which you can hear occasional water rafter shouts. The effect is unique and haunting. Curiously, the photo shoot location is the place where I had the first oppornunity to get to know Oetomo, Ary and Scott’s photographer. I guess the shoot was over only halfway through the time it took us to undrop our jaws over this crazy place. Oet (prn. OOT) is a successful, globetrotting photographer who is somehow also very easygoing and personable. He and I got along pretty well, and he’s going to be getting some calls from me about Java travel suggestions over the next few weeks.

We went to the Dirty Duck Diner for lunch. I don’t think it would fit in with Philly diners. It has its own rice paddy out back, a courtyard running through it with a six-childed nursing mom statue in its center, and thick wood tables arranged around a stone mosaic floor. I ate their crispy duck,, and It was Good.

Feeling like we had already taken a full day’s events in, we continued to the monkey forest, where there are a lot of monkeys that live in a forest, and a temple lives in the forest also, and the monkeys enjoy the temple. We walked among the monkeys, as they fought, screeched, and mated on the sidewalk with us. We have lots of pictures of monkeys. Monkeys with babies, monkies with mohawks, monkeys with oozing wounds, monkeys eating tubers, &c. You’ll see some photos soon when we get our photo blog going. The special tour we got of the temple was really cool, too, though we have no photos to document it.

At this point, some folks went shopping near the monkey forest. John, Scott’s brother, bought a carved white mask of Hanuman, a monkey-faced god of wisdom, devotion, valour, righteousness and strength. John approached the role from more of a jackass direction, which, it must be said, is more fun. He was wearing it on and off for the next few hours. I’m not sure, but he may tote this thing in his day pack for the rest of the trip so that he can put it on at a moment’s notice. Some of us went out for ice cream next, and he unintentionally scared the waitress with it when she came back to our table with the dishes. John definitely has an appetite. He ordered ice cream at this place, then, on his way out, he got a cone to go. This was despite the fact that he planned to be eating a mid-afternoon snack of a full rack of spare ribs in under an hour. You see, Oet had instructed us that we needed to go to a Warung around that area that sported “the best ribs in the world.” For whatever reason, this absolutely split our group by gender. The men went to get ribs, while the women shopped around at the Ubud marketplace. Oet, Scott, John, Scott’s friend Luke, and I sat down at a huge table made of a single board and had magnificent ribs. They were luscious, especially with the sauce Oet doctored up for us: sweet soy sauce, sambal, and hot mustard all mixed. Afterwards, Oet snuck over and paid for it all without telling us. We’re going to have to get him back for that somehow.

On the way back to Ary and Scott’s villa, we all got the Itis in a serious way and dozed off. Back at the villa, we hung out for a while and swam in the pool. Sarah, Allegra, Talia, and I didn’t head out to meet Allegra’s friend Seigi for dinner until after eight. We went to Warung Made for dinner, where I picked at a number of pretty good Balinese dishes; the ribs were still with me, so I wasn’t eating with my usual gusto. But it was good to meet Seigi, who comes up in conversation with Allegra every once in a while, but who, due to a semi-permanent post in Thailand, I’ve never met. He’s a really nice guy. Back at Talia, Allegra, and Seigi’s room, we found that he had brought not only his laptop, but also his IPod and IPod speaker mount with him from Bangkok. We had hardly opened the door before he had the indie pop playing. Sarah and I were pooped. After a brief conversation about the weird new term “Islamism” that’s been showing up in some newspapers, we broke off to do some laundry, filter some drinking water, and go to bed. Did I tell you we had a long day?