We arrived in warm Bali around 3pm.  The airport here was much smaller especially in contrast to the Seoul airport but decorated very nice Balinese style. We searched for a taxi driver that didn’t completely rip us off (welcome to the 3rd world) to take us to our hotel in Kuta. Our hotel is in a great location right by the main street with all the shops and restaurants and had a view of a temple.  We later learned that almost every home has a little temple so our view was of the hotel’s own temple.

We decided to explore and quickly found that this touristy area is filled with three types of stores. They are either super cheap souvenir shops, very cheap massage places, or Mini Marts/ Circle K.

We were excited to try Indonesian food and hopeful we would like it more than Korean and our hopes came true.  We had dinner at this cute place overlooking a pool.  The food seems to be some sort of mix between Thai and Chinese and the local beer Bintang is quite refreshing especially in this warm weather.

We walked to the beach and watched the sunset (we were a few minutes late but it was still pretty!).

Initially we planned on going out tonight, but the exhaustion of two flights and a 3 hour sleep in a hotel hit us so decided to stay in, but agreed that tomorrow night we would not be old and married and experience the night life.

After a good night sleep we got to enjoy the homemade breakfast at the hotel (delicious banana pancakes) while watching the rain fall.  It stopped in perfect timing for us to continue to explore.  We walked along the beach and Eitan decided he wanted to try and surf. The price for the surfboard rental and 2 beers came to about $5 dollars. He looked like quite the surfer bro especially with his hairy chest or as the local called it (his jungle).

While he surfed Sarah enjoyed chatting with locals and learning about their lifestyle here. (Side note: there is MUCH more English spoken here than Korea).

We then continued to walk and entered a more upscale touristy area called Seminyak.  We had delicious chili corn on the cob from a street vendor which seems to be the street food of choice here.

Later we went for lunch and got the Indonesian food sampler and an avocado shake and it was quite delicious.  This only confirmed how much better Indonesian food is, we liked everything on that platter and the fish wasn’t even fishy!

We continued to walk looking at many local art stores.  Eitan bought a Buddha mask (if you didn’t know Eitan LOVES Buddha things).  We didn’t realize how far we had walked until we decided to walk back to the hotel and our feet started to hurt and we got a few blisters each.  We believe we may have walked about ten miles today and when the day began we had said it would be a lazy beach day, oh well, exploring is more our style.

We rested a bit and then went to the clubby/bar area.  It was super trashy and reminded us of Cancun on spring break. By pure luck we found a hidden gem, an amazing Reggae bar, full of locals and one or two “I came to bali to find myself and the meaning of life, namaste” type of people. It had a fantastic live Indonesian Reggae band playing hits from all famous reggae artists. It was so neat to so all these different cultures in one room all connected because of the common bond of music.  They may not know much English but they can sing along with the songs.  We attempted to go to one of the trashy clubs just to see it but there was a cover charge and a Drake song was being played so that was enough to call it a night.

Bonus Pic: This is how they sell gasoline in Bali. These little stands are everywhere ready to serve any motorbike rider for around $.50 a liter. Using Absolut vodka bottles makes it kind of bizarre.