People are great. Also, this wedding shot is great (for the bride.) Generally, this was a great moment and everyone should feel great about it. Weddings! One of my best friends got married last weekend, and I was this guy. The photographer. Sometimes things come full circle in an interesting way. I love photographing weddings because you encounter this poignant and boisterous nebula of a thing in a tiny several-hour package, and then you unpack it in the editing of the photographs, and if you are responsible for crafting an album, you have the opportunity to entirely rescaffold the narrative in this profoundly intimate way. I suppose you have the chance to do that with travel photography, also. It is a weighty thing!
Hanuman is incredibly popular in Bali, and for good reason. Not only is he relatable because monkeys are actually everywhere all of the time, but the Ramayana is an amazing story. Also, Hanuman thought the sun was a mango once and tried to fly toward it to eat it, and I can relate to that. You can see him above, contently grasping at the sky, and not attempting to fly anywhere.
I'm not entirely sure of where my travels will take me next, or how, or why. I used to heavily rely on performing an act of service in some way while traveling, and then it was foreign language study, and now it's yoga--if I could do all three concurrently, I absolutely would. I need something to tether me to the place-ness of the place, when I travel, and creating a community for myself prior to arrival really accomplishes that. I don't want to float through it as though I were at home, or stick too much to what makes me comfortable, or to who I already know, or isolate myself. That being said, I need to be able to find vegetarian food and avoid abduction along some dark, decrepit side street. Priorities!
I love visual creative outlets, which is I suppose why I like photography so much, but I often wish I were better at drawing. Most critical acclaim for my drawings has been based on their tragic hilarity. They are very bad, but they embrace being very bad. I would like to venture into the wild world of webcomics. Perhaps when I am older and wiser and need to convey this to 'The Youth.' I am getting a bit off-Bali-topic here, though I can perhaps tie everything back together by suggesting that Bali would be an excellent place to spend a year privately tutoring English, working on art, and inexpensively finding oneself. I could definitely imagine that life, and would endorse it to others. The Balinese people with whom I interacted were so welcoming and kind, too... it would be an easy place to escape for a bit. It helps that the Indonesian language is fascinating and extremely easy to learn from an English-speaking background. The Indonesian Embassy in DC teaches it for free on Thursday nights, if anyone is interested!
I did not ride on a motorbike while in Bali, which is either a travesty or the reason why I am able to type this blog entry using my fully-functional set of limbs--it's difficult to determine which. This is often a difficult decision I face while traveling... do I do the reasonable thing, or the daring thing that will possibly result in an awesome story and maximum comedy? I often go with the former, assuming that I will organically (inevitably) be faced with the latter at some point, anyway. Perhaps my adventures in parasites/dysentery/whatever count as that? It's a stylistic difference between myself and others, I suppose. It's also the reason why I never couch surf. I'm a firm believer in Murphy's Law (except perhaps in booking a flight from Singapore to Denpasar in the first place, which is risky business nowadays. Cheap, though!)
All up on somebody else's wedding shots again. As I was telling my sister the other day, one of my favorite things about the wedding shots on this beach in particular is that people regularly drown here from the enormous, completely spontaneous waves that crash on the shore and drag innocent bystanders out to sea. A very rocky, very heavily-currented sea. There's some metaphor about marriage in there, somewhere.
I am not sure what the purpose of this statue is, or was, but I would like it in front of my home. I did not go to any zoos in Indonesia because I hear that animal treatment there is seriously problematic--which is a shame, because I love nature reserves that provide much-needed refuge for animals (and often animals that are endangered or have been rescued from trafficking or inappropriate captivity situations.) Belize is an excellent example of a country that Does That Well. Someday, when I am my own country, I would like to do that well. If you would like a creature named after you, that can be arranged.
Bali: A Place You Should Visit. Excellent Adventures Abound.
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