Bali Day 7: Playing With My Rindik. I am sorry to report that this will be a pervasive theme today.

Yup. Rindik jokes are just the beginning today. Buckle up, kids.

Today is our last day at Villa Bo Sophie. It's been a great introduction to Bali and we've had a great time. This vacation started, in part, because of a time-share resort stay that Kerri's mom generously gifted us. We got a free week at a resort and booked Airbnbs for the other two weeks. Today, we're heading to the resort.
We booked a ride through Wayan, our ever-efficient house manager and he is sending Wysuk (pronounced Wee-Suk) to drive us today. I didn't even laugh. Because I am an adult, dammit. People in Bali tend to use What's App for communication. When I clicked on Wysuk's profile, his name came up as Man Suk.
I just want to reiterate that I am an adult. That is all.
When we booked the ride, we hoped to see some places along Bali's east coast on our drive to the resort, which is in Nusa Dua on the very southern part of the island. Wayan suggested a few places that might be good to stop, among them were a few we were familiar with from some research we did ahead of time. One was a place called Kertha Gosa, the Justice Palace, located in the Klungkung Regency. I looked it up online and it seemed like one nice building with some very cool paintings on the ceiling, so we decided to check it out since it was basically on our way.
We had arranged a ride for 12:00, but were ready very early so I texted Wysuk and said we were ready whenever he was. He sent 3 messages in reply:
Yes, I do.
I come.
On the way.
With a slightly different structure, it would be a beautiful haiku.
About 10 minutes later, he arrived with a retinue of cleaning people who were there to clean out the villa and get it ready for the next guests. As with all our other drivers, Wysuk was kind and chatty. His English was spotty, but, as we've been doing, we got by with a bit of improvisational charades, simple sentences, and laughter. When we asked him to detour through Kerta Gosa, he said "Client is king!" and off we went.
He kept up a running dialog about Bali; the people, the culture everything. He punctuated his sentences with lots of hand gestures (which was alarming, given the winding roads and dense traffic) and sound effects.
"Oh! It's Instagram People Season! Click Clack Click Clack Click Clack!"
He'd beep his horn if other drivers didn't start driving before the lights turned green, but then he'd drop to 3 mph on a busy highway while he was telling a story that needed extra emphasis with hand gestures.
But he got us there safely and parked alongside a huge monument that looked like a huge, ummm... well...

Turns out that is supposed to look like a giant... um... Lingga Yoni! Way to go, ancient Balinese people!

So, inside the penis there are dioramas?!?
That is a sentence I never considered writing before. But it's true.

I do genuinely love the slightly fractured English on all the signs in Bali. The dioramas were the sort of thing one might expect to find in the historical society of a small town in the U.S. that some dubious claim to fame.
"Miltonsburg: Home of the factory that made buttons to close the flaps on the long underwear worn by the 33rd regiment in the Civil War".
There was a guy sitting on the floor inside the giant penis. there is another of those sentences I never thought I'd write. I assumed the guy was a guide. I struck up a conversation with him. He smiled and chatted a bit before sitting back and asking me for a cigarette. It was only then that I realized he didn't work there, he was just hanging out inside the penis until it stopped raining outside.
As one does.
The penis motif is going to continue. In fact, it's going to get much more intense. Brace yourself.
From the giant penis, we walked across the street to a gorgeous and, miraculously, almost empty area that,  if I understood the signs correctly, was one of the first governmental meeting places in Bali.
The building was the one I had seen on the internet. It was a small, open-sided building set in a small, bright green man-made pond like the floating temples we'd visited. It was really breathtakingly ornate and beautiful.

There was a kiosk explaining that the ceiling was painted with graphic descriptions of the gods punishing people for all sorts of things in truly sadistic ways. Most alarmingly was the fact that the audio portion was read by a child. Hearing a child saying "Burning the vagina and penis of those who liked to have illegal intercourse" was unsettling at best. But, to keep things light, I made a game for you. It's called "Match the description with the depiction!"
Are you ready?

Let's make it more interesting. Here is the entire ceiling. This will be like Where's Waldo, except that this game can be called "Whose Genitals Are Being Mutilated Here and Why?"

We eventually tore ourselves away from the exciting ways that genitals can be torn, shredded, burned, and generally abused and wandered the grounds a bit more. Bali, in sharp contradistinction to the rest of Indonesia, is about 80% Hindu. Most of the remaining 20% are Muslim. Those proportions are reversed on the other islands of Indonesia. The area where we were inspecting paintings of genitorture is a outlying pocket of Muslim majority and there was a call to prayer being broadcast as we wandered the beautiful grounds. It added a lovely auditory element to the day that I really enjoyed. 

The final stop in The Justice Palace was the museum. Fearing more dioramas, I was reluctant to go in, but I dutifully drudged into the humid, dusty museum past the crew of guys painting the outside walls.

Look at that amazing lawn. Kerri refused to play human chess with me.

More delightfully incomprehensible explanations.

An explanation of the Bale Kulkul, loosely - a bell tower.

It took all my will power not to start playing this bell.

More about Kertha Gosa. The more you read, the less you understand...

These are rindiks. I did not even try not to play them.

We plodded through the museum. There were a few interesting things to see, but it wasn't until we came to the last room that things got really exciting. There were two bamboo instruments, called rindiks, on a small pedestal. As I was looking at them, one of the guys painting the walls came in and started playing one. He offered the mallets to Kerri who tried to dive out a window to escape and not have to play music. I, however, nearly jumped over it to sit down and play. He showed me the rhythm I was supposed to play.  When I got it wrong, he snapped, "No! No! I play the melody! You play along!"
One of the other painters, came up and pulled the mallets out of my hands to show me how to play.
I realized that these guys were actually museum docents, not, in fact, painters.
I figured it out eventually and it was a blast.
Here is a 2 minute video of me getting my mallets taken away because, you may be shocked to learn, I am a sucky rindik player BECAUSE I HAVE NEVER EVEN SEEN THIS INSTRUMENT BEFORE, GUY!
But we practiced a bit.
Next is a 30 second video of me rockin' my rindik.
When we finished, he laughed and asked, "You play music?"
"No," I admitted. "I'm just a drummer."
"I thought so!" he laughed. Then he pantomimed an epic 80's style hair band drum solo.
For about 45 seconds.
It got weird.

From there, the echoes of the rindik still bouncing around in my earholes, we were off to Nusa Dua to stay at the resort.

The hand hanging out of the window is the universal Balinese symbol for "I'm going to pull out in front of you now. Please don't hit my dangerously overloaded vehicle."

The farther we got from Ubud and the closer we got to the big city of Denpassar, the more Wysuk began to lose his polish of being a wise old guide and the more he began to look like a bumbling yokel in the big city. At one point he tossed me his phone and asked me to help him navigate, which may possibly have been fine if the satellite connection he used hadn't been very laggy and if all the directions hadn't been in Indonesian. And since none of the directions were "Hello. How are you? I like spicy food. Thank you." I was sort of lost.
Literally.
We did, eventually, find our way to the resort, which is a huge complex of apartments with a giant pool, restaurants, bars, and games so the kids can be occupied while mom and dad drink Arak at the pool.

More dining room.

Fancy bathroom.

It was clearly designed to appeal to a Western crowd, right down to the 100% beige motif for the interior colors and Wednesday nights being an all-you-can-eat Italian Night Buffet in the restaurant. I'll be elsewhere on Wednesday night. And, in fact, every night.
The resort is lovely. I just don't need Italian food when I'm half way around the world.
So, rather than resort food, I went out to get some food to cook in the apartment. We were both exhausted and didn't want to go out to eat. I wandered around and eventually found an Indomaret, a ubiquitous convenience store in Bali. It seemed to be the only place in the area to get food.
And food is a loose term here.
Our dinner was a hilariously awful mess of Indonesian boxed macaroni and cheese flavor, Happitos (which are awesome Doritos knock-offs) and several Bali Bangers to help us ward off scurvy, which is an ever-present threat everywhere in the world.
We showered and both fell asleep on the couch while meditating.
Tomorrow, we hang around at the pool and drink rum.
I hope.