A broken hip and rehab are part of the reason it has been so long between posts.  I still have a good number of thoughts about and pictures of my visit to Bali which I hope to share.

Rather than eat breakfast at the restaurant at my hotel, I read about several coffee shop type places a few blocks away.  This gave me a chance to learn something about the neighborhood as I walked out and back each morning.  I found that religion, mostly Hinduism, is omnipresent.

There are temples in the middle of town, enclosed and not open to foreigners.

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More intimately, households often have shrines and put out offerings in small paper “dishes.” In one case these offerings were made to a statue of Buddha.

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Some households or shops have Hindu shrines where offerings are set out.

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Sometimes offerings like these are placed on the sidewalk in front of a door.  One must pay attention to where one walks – however the unevenness of sidewalks already made this necessary.  Construction sites and debris also made the route I took less than elegant. I learned that “Ati Ati” means danger, as in “danger: construction zone”.  The Balinese script is found in some museums, but has elsewhere been replaced by the western alphabet.

In a shop at another site, the offering was placed on top of fruit for sale, making it safe from missteps by passers-by.

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These offerings must fade quickly but I rarely saw one that looked bedraggled.  They are clearly important to their makers.

 

 

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