Puppet shows and shopping

So Christmas night we had dinner at a wonderful restaurant called Bali Buddha. It's all local/organic/natural/everything great. And it's delicious. Plus it was only a 3 minute walk away from the hotel with a puppet show we wanted to see.

We walked into the room where the puppet show would be. It was in an art museum/gallery so the walls were all white and there were paintings all around us. There were about 20 chairs set up in rows facing a sheet with a single candle flickering behind it. Almost all the chairs filled up, too, with older married couples, a mom and her daughter, and a small group of traveling college students.

So at 8(ish) the puppet show began. It started off with a huge sound from a gong behind the sheet. There was about 10 minutes of beautiful music played on traditional xylophones and some instrument that made a whirring noise. It was loud.

Balinese puppet shows themselves are called Wayang and they use shadow puppets. They're put on by a Dalang, who is essentially the puppet master. The art of being a Dalang is passed down in a family, according to the little handout we were given. The Dalang who put on the show we went to was 80 years old. The story he presented was originally from India. I couldn't believe how fast he moved. He also had two assistants who handed him the correct puppets, although he did everything that was visible to us himself. The show was put on mostly in Indonesian so we couldn't understand much of the dialogue, although there were two short sections in English that were insignificant to the plot. The basic story, again outlined in a handout, was that a demon was threatening to kill a king's entire kingdom. To appease the demon, a human sacrifice would have to be made. A man, knowing he had strength beyond any normal human, volunteered to be the sacrifice. He ended up killing all the demons so everyone was able to live happily ever after.

The puppets themselves were incredibly intricate. Their body positions were individual and spoke to their character's qualities. most had moveable hands and arms, and a few had jaws that would move when they spoke. If they didn't, the Dalang vibrated the character to know who was doing the talking. The Dalang also had used a different voice and inflection for each character. He moved between personalities so fluently during dialogues it was incredible.

My favorite puppet wasn't a person but rather anything that it needed to be. In this play, it was wind, water, thought, and movement (if I remember correctly). It was in the shape of a leaf and danced around the stage many times. With that puppet and the others, the Dalang had incredible skill moving them closer and farther from the screen to show overall outlines or the intricate details. The xylophones continued to play throughout the performance. Whenever a character walked, two wooden blocks were hit together, and the timing of this sound and the Dalang's movements was perfect.

The entire show took an hour, which was a little on the long side for uncomfortable plastic chairs, but it was beautiful nonetheless. On our walk back to the hotel, we bought some gelato. Elena said the cold almost made it feel like Christmas.

Yesterday we had a slow day. I was up early and went for a run before many people in Ubud were awake. It was great to be able to run in the road instead of on the sidewalk that has so many dips, cracks, and missing planks. When I ran by Monkey Forest, a few monkeys eyed me wearily, but none chased. I'm really not sure what I would have done.

I had breakfast at Kafe and caught up on recent world news online. Funny how a week without reading a newspaper can make one get so behind. I window shopped for the rest of the morning, looking at clothing stores and souvenir shops. And I had one of my most successful bargaining experiences ever! A lady selling paintings started at 150,000rupia for one, but I got her down to 100,000 for two. So I'm now the happy owner of two 12'x12' paintings of people working in rice fields.

Elena and I had lunch in the room and did work and relaxed on the porch until dinner. At dinner, I tried my first Bintang, the Indonesian subsidiary of Heineken, which was pretty nice. But the dessert Elena and I both had was the best part of the day. They had warmed up bananas and then mashed them up. Then they sprinkled it with cinnamon, palm sugar, and coconut shavings. It was like dessert baby food. So yummy.

We had another early night, which gets us to today. It was pouring rain at 6am, so I sat on the porch with a book. There are some incredible birds that live in and around this hotel so I've been listening to them all morning. I had breakfast: a bowl of fruit and a warm banana sandwich. Again, yum. In half an hour, Elena and I will take the bus to a beach for the day. And that's about it!