Bali Bali Bali

Sooo I spent Valentine's weekend in Bali with Jon and some of his friends. So as I have mentioned it's rainy season here in Indonesia, so all day Thursday it was raining in bali and we had a 50% chance it would rain each day over the weekend. We got in on Friday and it was raining in the morning but it all cleared up in the afternoon. Luckily we had amazing weather all weekend long, it was sunny every day except sunday when it didn't start raining until 4pm. We had some good Karma thrown our way!!So Friday we spent in Ubud which is a art, shopping, historical district of Bali. It is also very geared toward tourist so it has it's ups and downs. We spent the afternoon walking around the city, looking in shops and then getting some duck which is what that area of Bali is apparently known for. The cool thing about Ubud is that the temples are all mixed in with the shops so there would be this really old amazing temple next to some little art shop which was pretty neat. After our bit of walking around we headed to feed some monkeys. I have to say a bit scary especially if you are holding the bananas. After some monkeying around we headed to this little bar in Ubud for a drink and wouldn't you know it, we ran into a guy who was from NY/NJ, he was born in NYC and moved to NJ many years ago. It's a small small world!
The rest of the weekend consisted of 4 hours in the spa on sat getting about 5 different treatments (thank you Jon!!) and then dinner overlooking the ocean. It was a pretty relaxing and different way to spend a weekend in bali, well very different from the first time I went. Sunday consisted of going down the water slides at the hotel and sitting by the pool drinking pina colodas and soaking in some last minute sun. All and all a perfect weekend especially b/c I didn't plan a thing.
One crazy thing which I unfortunately didn't get to take any pictures of was the rain storm that came through on Sunday night as we headed to the airport. It was a pretty heavy downpour and b/c there isn't much infrastructure in place in Bali the roads floated immediately. It was crazy to see all these motorbikes going through water that was up to their waste. The water on certain streets was easily waste high, pretty crazy stuff, thankfully we left tons of time to the airport since we knew it might be a long ride there.

Well more to come after next weekend, off to dinner now...

Indonesia Part Two

So I am back in Indonesia for a second time with work and it's actually a bit different this time for many reasons. It is actually seems to be the height of rainy season right now, which means it rains in Jakarta just about every day. Most of the time it rains for a couple hours and then clears up but the sun doesn't really come out much in the city which is good and bad. Good in the sense that it's ALOT cooler then when I was here in August and bad well thats obviously why.

So the first weekend I got here, I just got acclimated to being back in Jakarta and spent the weekend hanging around with Jon. Then after a nice long week at work, I headed to the beach with Jon and his friends. It was a great spot and on my list of maybe one of my favorite spots so far and definitely a great place to go with alot of people. The second half of the drive was beautiful, it passed some tea planations, palm planations and other beautiful greenery.Once we got to the spot there were little cabins located right on the beach and they also had these little huts right next to the water where you could get a massage while listening the ocean for $5 USD (including a tip), yeah thats what I said $5 and the massages were soooo good, I decided to get one on Sat and Sunday! AHH so great.
Pretty much spent the weekend relaxing by the beach, getting massages, watching some Australia Rules Football and playing a silly game apples to apples. All and all a good weekend! Below are some pictures of a little late lunch time spot on the side of the road were I tried Martabak, yummy (basically an egg mixture inside fried dough).More to come, I am off to Bali this weekend for some more R&R :)