Time Passes Too Fast in Paradise

It’s Sunday already, and time has eaten up 15 vacation days. I’m just hanging around working on my new ebook, doing some reading, and checking up on the kids. Right now, I have this feeling of incredible laziness – not wanting to do anything in particular which I notice happens sometimes when I spend too much time writing and not enough getting out and around. And distractedness. It is so easy to get distracted here – I start one thing, someone comes and wants something, and I end up forgetting about what I had originally started.

I reviewed two international schools today and sent out a few emails. I upgraded some software on both Macs. I started a few letters and spent a lot of time keeping on eye on the new kittens that still look like oversized baby rats. I need to start working on my new lesson plans for next term, but I’m waiting until next week when I’ll start feeling more urgency to getting it done.

My two eldest daughters took off yesterday to go down to Denpasar to visit family there and for “refreshing” as my oldest daughter calls it. In the meantime, I’m spending time outside on the balcony writing on the MacBook. I love having the ocean breeze to cool me while I sit here writing rather than the fan when I’m inside working on the iMac.

A few folks bought my Retiring in Bali eBook today, and it’s always nice to have a sale or two while I sit here writing another book. , as well as working on some updates for the Bali book.

The photo today is the balcony where I’ve started doing most of my writing. I can gaze at the sea when I’m at a loss for words, although the afternoon sun can get a little intense. Kind of like being an old hippie sitting out here writing, having a few beers, and listening to the Greatful Dead. Plus, I’ve figured out that my cable will reach through the window so I can get internet access out here, and connect to a power cable as well when I need one. Time for retirement again, I think. This setup is better than it was before.

I stopped by the local mini-market to buy some beer and hotdogs, and there was an expat there that I think that I know, but I couldn’t quite make out where I knew him from so I didn’t say anything – I hate the memory loss that seems to be accompanying my advancing age. So far it seems selective though; my long-term memory is fine, I just can’t seem to remember who people are. This could be a problem when I forget my wife and kids.

I bought a new battery today for my handphone, as cell phones are called here in Indonesia. After 5 ½ years, the battery kept dying on me at very inconvenient times like when my wife is trying to figure out where I am. Hmm, makes it seem like I’m trying to hide, or that I am up to something fishy.

I’ll get around to the ghost thing in a day or two when I get most of it sussed out.

Time to Go Home

Time to Go Home

Three weeks in Sumbawa, and almost a month away from home. I’m more than ready to get back to Bali. It’s been different living and working here this time. I live in the cell, and I work in a school that I’m just getting comfortable with. It’s been an adjustment, but I’ve started looking at this entire experience like a long traveling trip.
I’ve made up little routines that get me through each day, as travelers often do. Rise, shower, and drop off my computers in my classroom and then off to the mess for breakfast. Once that’s finished, I go back to school and take care of business on the internet. My students arrive , and I spend the day teaching. Every day at 4, I leave school and have dinner at the mess. Then back to school to get my computers and back to the cell where I work or write for the rest of the evening until 10 when I turn in for the night. Each day is pretty much the same, variations occur only with the classes that I have to teach each day.

There are always lessons; as much as I dislike the mantra life-long learning that IB people chant like the religiously impaired, I still am learning. So the lesson from this trip?

This is the last journey as a teacher. Like the aging baseball player who comes back for one more year when the arm is gone or the bat has lost its magic, I’ve realized that I like the life of retirement more than I like the life of teaching. I have a great class and I’m enjoying being with them, but it’s time to get out and do something else with the time that I have left to me be it a few months or 20 years. I have a few things that I want to do that I didn’t get around to on the last retirement and this time I plan on getting to all of them. The most important of those is being with my family. Just two more days.

Next, I’m enjoying getting a chance to talk and work with the Indonesian teachers. I haven’t had much of a chance to do that over the past 19 years of working in Indonesia, and it’s been an interesting and instructive experience. The school is undergoing a big change, and as an anthropologist, it was interesting to watch it from a somewhat distanced view when I was preparing to leave last semester, and now it’s interesting to be involved in working on the change even if it’s as someone who is only here temporarily. The expat population is less than half of what it was when I arrived here five and a half years ago. That in itself is a big change for the students as well as the expat teachers.

The Election of Barrack Obama and the Bali Bombings

It’s been an intense week here in Bali and around the world. First, of course, was the result of the election in the US. We now have an African-American president and hopes of moving forward with fixing the mess that the world is in these days. And, the world has responded in the same spirit of hope and optimism that has been seen in the US.

Then, last night, the Bali Bombers were finally executed. This drama has been played out nationally and internationally for the six years since the bombers murdered hundreds of foreigners and Indonesians. Personally, I’m opposed to the death penalty so I didn’t get any personal satisfaction from their execution, although I know that many Australians and Indonesians did. I would rather have seen them rot in jail for the rest of their lives where they would not have become martyrs for that tiny minority of Indonesians who support their perverted view of Islam.

Reza Aslan makes an excellent argument in his book, No god but God, that the terrorism that is going on in the world is not against non-Muslims, but, rather, is against Muslims. He says:

“The tragic events of September 11, 2001, may have fueled the clash-of-monotheisms mentality among those Muslims, Christians, and Jews who seem so often to mistake religion for faith and scripture for God. But it also initiated a vibrant discourse among Muslims about the meaning and message of Islam in the twenty-first century. What has occurred since that fateful day amounts to nothing short of another Muslim civil war – a fitnah – which, like the contest to define Islam after the Prophet’s death, is tearing the Muslim community into opposing factions.”

The death of the Bali Bombers gives Muslims in Indonesian a chance to move forward the discourse about the nature of Islam and the role that it plays in our lives and how it will fit in the world community.

I just finished doing an interview this morning on ABC radio in Darwin on these topics. If you want to listen to it, I'll add a link once it is posted on the ABC website.

Hope Wins

It’s over, and it’s started. Barrack Obama is the President-Elect of the United States of America. I’m still somewhat in shock because like many Obama supporters, I had this sense that somehow, someway, Obama would lose despite the polls. I imagine that by tomorrow, this will all become real.

For people of my generation who were involved in the civil rights and anti-war movement, this is an event that I never thought that I would live to see.

What else is there to say? It's amazing.

What Does Retirement Mean?

That was what a former student of mine asked me the other day. Actually, she listed a number of definitions from the dictionary, and in her usual brash style, asked what it was that I didn’t understand about the definitions.

I have to admit that I have failed again in my second attempt at retirement. The first time that I retired – 10 years ago – it was just too early and my plan for a business here in Bali didn’t work out; I learned the valuable lesson that I’m not a businessman, better to stick with teaching since I’m fairly good at that. And this time?

Well, I actually planned for this one, and except for the little matter of the world financial crisis, I was ready. I could stay retired and hope for the best, but I hate the idea of leaving the kids and my wife with no money if I happen to die in the next few years. So I was toying with the idea of going back to work. It just happened that I received a call, right at that time, asking if I was interested in coming back to my old job for seven months until a replacement for me arrived. It was one of those serendipitous things – returning to work is good for the school and good for me as well. It gives them a known quantity, and it gives me a quick infusion of hard cash to make up for some of the losses in the stock market.

This retirement has been excellent, although I actually work almost more than I did when I was working. That is I write about six hours a day. I managed to finish the eBook on Bali, am halfway done with the international schools book, and have a start on the book on Islam that I want to do after the international schools book is finished. I’ve spent a lot of time snorkeling; I’ve gotten the kids on track with their new schools; my wife and I have made extensive repairs to the houses here (badly needed after five years of being empty); I went through the visa process so that I know I can do it again in another seven months; and I’ve had a lot of time to read and reflect.

I know now that I can handle retirement – often problematic for workaholics like me. In fact, I’ve only begun to do the things that I wanted to do when I was planning my retirement. I still have a lot lined up for the next time.

So, here I am working on getting ready mentally for a move back to Sumbawa for seven months. I’m not fond of the idea of leaving the family; I’m really going to miss being here with the kids and my wife everyday without the distraction of work, but I can rationalize this decision to temporarily return to work, by looking at it as just 25 weeks of work that will give us a little breathing room economically. Then back here in June again to start retirement all over.

The Ocean as a Garbage Dump

Another day out snorkeling today. It’s amazing the amount of junk in the sea around here. People in this neighborhood still throw trash in the ocean, and everyday the river that feeds into the sea from here brings in all sorts of garbage from the markets. Then you have the boats and ships that pass by here and throw their trash into the ocean. And some of the small hotels here dump sewage directly in the Bali Sea. And, that’s where all this garbage comes from.

A few years ago, I took a rubber dinghy along the north coast and down the west coast. While I was on this two day trip, I went past little islands of garbage floating in the water: bottles, plastic sandals, plastic bags filled with trash, old clothes, rubber pellets, and a mass of other odds and ends.

Yesterday, I came across a few articles on the internet about this terrible problem and what it is doing to our oceans. What do we do about this one?

The View of American Politics from an American Abroad

As the election for the next US president enters the final weeks and heats up, more and more American nutcases crawl out of their paranoid cocoons. As an American expatriate who spent the first forty years of my life at home, and the past nineteen over in Asia, I find all of this troubling, irritating, worrisome, and, somehow, vaguely hopeful.

I’ve been alternately amused and horrified by how McCain and Palin have responded to an economic crisis that is rapidly spreading outward from America to the rest of the world. Starting with McCain’s initial grandstanding (I’m suspending my campaign…) to Palin’s inability to demonstrate that she understands anything about the US economy or the rest of the world generally, they have tried to awaken and energize the worst in the American national character – racism, xenophobia, isolationism, and ethnocentrism in order to avoid addressing the most pressing problem throughout the world today. The images coming out of the Republican rallies are beginning to get frightening. That Americans are openly exhibiting this type of behavior publicly is worrisome. That supposedly responsible journalists and politicians continue to justify the McCain/Palin rhetoric that is bordering on the dangerous is irritating to say the least.

But, there are rays of hope in all this. The hope? The hope is that an African-American is so close to becoming the President of the United States. The country has come so far from my days as a Middle School student supporting JFK and then as a High School student working in the Civil Rights and anti-war movement. Will Barack Obama be the leader who can address the many problems still confronting American society? Maybe not (time will only tell), but he offers the hope that he can energize the young people in America to move from the culture of greed and individualism to the culture of service and participation.

I’ve watched the prestige of America drop precipitously over the past eight years as the Bush/Cheney administration has created a rift between America and most of the rest of the world. Even those countries that have traditionally had ties with us have moved away. Most of my colleagues during my years overseas have been non-Americans, and I have watched them take on anti-American attitudes as the US has pushed its own agenda on the rest of the world. Not surprisingly, they are almost completely pro-Obama because, in part, they see him as willing to develop an era of partnership with the rest of the world. I’ve already done my job and voted in this election. If you are an American overseas, make sure that you put your vote in as well. It’s our responsibility to the United States and the rest of the world.

The End of Ramadan

The End of Ramadan

Well, the long month of Ramadan officially ended here in Indonesia tonight, much to my (and many others’ relief). The first and last weeks are always the hardest for me. The first week is difficult because I need to get in the rhythm of waking and eating and then sleeping and waking and then sleeping and waking again. All this because of the kids’ school schedules. Indonesia is a multi-cultural, multi-religious nation, but depending on where you live, customs and school schedules can be quite different.

When we lived in Sumbawa which is almost completely Muslim, the kids were given most of the month of Ramadan off for vacation. Here in Bali where most of the population is Hindu, the kids get a couple of days off for Ramadan while their main vacations are planned around the major Hindu religious holidays. And with four children in three different schools, schedules vary from day to day. One child has PE on Tuesdays and needs to get up at 5 AM, another two have PE on Wednesdays and needs to get up early that day, but the other two can sleep until 5:30, and the last has her PE day on Thursdays. Anyway, I think you get the point.

So tonight is Takbiran (the last night of the fasting month) and everyone in the kampung is driving around in vehicles celebrating. I’m on the third floor, as usual, writing. No getting up at 3:15 tomorrow morning. A relief.

The point, though, as I have mentioned before is to control our desires and needs and to remember the less fortunate. In this small kampung where so many exist on a subsistence level, it is impossible to forget the less fortunate. All I need to do is look next door where my neighbor still has half of his roof missing from the storms last January because he doesn’t have the money to replace the tiles. Or a glance at the neighbor to the west, who has a house with the thinnest plywood serving as the walls for his dwelling. The old Christian saying often goes through my mind, there but for the grace of God…

Controlling the desires and needs is something else. That is a lot more difficult. I am a smoker – I’ve quit many times only to begin again once I hit a period of stress. For me, Ramadan is a powerful reminder that I can control those needs and desires if only I have the resolve. Unfortunately, outside of Ramadan, the pleasures of smoking outweigh just about everything else.

Tomorrow morning is the day of community prayers that take place here in Singaraja in the large field just down the street from the police headquarters. Tomorrow, I’ll finish up the month of blogs and videos on Ramadan

Ten Points of (semi) Randomness in Bali

1. I’ve uploaded two videos to YouTube after watching an interesting video done by an American anthropologist and his students who are doing participant observation on virtual communities. I’m watching to see what happens there.

2. The YouTube videos are, as I’ve said on the videos, another medium to work with in writing about life over here. It’s nice to get beyond written language for a while.

3. Now that my children have access to the internet, it’s fascinating to see how quickly they have adapted it to their personal interests. My second daughter is on to the social network scene; my second son uses it to search for science information. Two points to back up my long held belief that if children want to learn, they will figure out ways to do it by themselves if there is no one there to interfere with them. There’s an interesting TED talk about this which I will be reviewing in a few days.

4. It’s gotten hot here in Singaraja. I forgot about how hot it can actually be here, as June, July and August are nice and cool here on the coast.

5. I love the freedom that retirement has given me to do things when I want to do them.

6. I miss teaching and doing something that I’m fairly good at.

7. Politeness is a trait that isn’t given enough value these days. I’m amazed at how rude people can be on the internet. What happened to civility? One of the things that I love to hear from folks that visit here is how polite my children are.

8. Why do people build houses with pools when they have a house on the ocean? It seems to be one of the negative things that Westerners bring here. Quite anti-social. Swimming in the ocean with the neighbors is a great way to develop social interaction.

9. Why do foreigners want to come here and live in these foreigner only gated communities? What’s the point of living in Bali if you’re not involved in the Balinese community?

10. What do old men see in really young women? OK, beyond the obvious? And please, for the sake of the rest of us, don’t wander around the supermarket groping each other.

Life in Bali – Why do I Stay in Bali?

Life in Bali isn’t all that you would want; for some people it’s more, and for others it’s a string of one disappointment after another. The last post explained why I came here. Why do I stay in Bali?

Once, years ago during my first attempt at retirement, I fell into just what I said that I wouldn’t – hanging out with expats, most of whom had one story of disappointment or another: older men with younger wives who found that their true love had a Balinese guy on the side, older women with younger men who found out the same thing, entrepreneurs who wanted to open the latest nightlife spot, guys who wanted to trade stocks on the internet for a living, the occasional lowlife who preyed on anyone who might come up with a buck or two. Why did I do this? Well, it tends to be our nature to want, at some point, to hang out with those who are like us.

Hmmm. What does that mean? We want to speak English or French or Spanish, we want someone who can connect with our stories, we want someone who understands our references and jokes and little pleasures and pains.

Moving between two cultures, as I had for many years, I wasn’t prepared (although I was sure that I was both by training and inclination) to live completely inside an Indonesian culture. “Going native” was how anthropologists used to put it, sniffing a bit and looking down their noses at the anthropologist who fell prey to the temptations of living locally on a full time basis. I was sure that I would never do this.

So, like so many others before me, I began hanging out with the local expat crowd. Of course, that included drinks before noon, a few mindless beach games, and a lot of gossip about whomever wasn’t at the bar or restaurant where we happened to meet that day.

I lasted all of six months before I crashed and burned and was looking for any way out of Bali. I found it when a job offer came out of the blue. It took me nine more years of wandering around the world before I was ready to get back to it.

The Balinese have this wonderful philosophy that centers on balance. I needed a little of that in my life which has moved wildly from one extreme to another.

So I wake up in the morning; the sunrise comes through my east windows and wakes me on those mornings when I’m not up before sunrise to wake my children and prepare them for another school day. On school days, I’m up at 5:30 when there is only a glimmer of purple on the eastern horizon. I climb down the steep stairs from the third floor to wake the children who are sleeping on the second floor; then I continue on to the first floor to wake the other children who are sleeping on the first floor.

As they queue up at the bathrooms for their morning ablutions, I gaze out at the sun slowing climbing up through the eastern sky – just a little glint of red now mixed in with the purple. The sounds of water running and mandiing being done.
My wife and I put out bowls of cereal, glasses of juice, plates of toasts for the children to choose from for breakfast. Like a lot of children around the world, there is always at least one who rises late, and still full from a late night snack sneaked from the refrigerator, doesn’t want breakfast. She can buy something to eat at one of the small warungs outside the school grounds.

My wife and I split the children up and drive them to school on our motorbikes. As I leave the kampung (neighborhood), I nod to the traffic cop on the corner. We weave our way through the Singaraja morning traffic as my daughter calls out to classmates, “Aku duluang.”

I return home and check email, then sweep and dust and mop the third floor while my wife makes breakfast for the two of us. We eat together and discuss what we have planned for the day. It’s rarely the same plan; she has her routines located in a lifetime of living in this small, poor neighborhood in North Bali, I have mine based on the internet and my writing. At some point in the day though, we manage to do something together despite our different schedules.

The children return home hot and sweaty and hungry. They’re fed by my wife while I ask about homework and how school went. The Mom and the Teacher- we’ve lived these roles for so long that they fit like a comfortable skin that we wear on top of our core selves.

In the afternoon, everyone naps at some point. It’s a lovely point of living in the tropics for those of us who aren’t constrained by the rigors of everyday work. Later as the sun goes down, we all meet again for dinner and a little talk about the day. As we finish the dinner dishes, kids wander off to visit friends or finish up homework. I climb the stairs one more time to do some evening writing, my wife moves outside to chat with friends.

Why do I stay in Bali?

How Did I End Up in Bali?

I recently celebrated the 19th anniversary of my move to Indonesia. I always tend to do a little reflection as the years pass, and I continue to be amazed that I am still here after 19 years. An old friend whom I haven’t talked to in close to 40 years got in touch with me the other day, and the big question was how did I end up in Bali? How indeed.. I’ve just finished my first ebook, and despite what I once said about never writing a book about Bali, I ended up doing just that.

How did I get here, and why did I stay?

I came to Bali on my first vacation when I was teaching in Papua, then called Irian Jaya. Bali was relatively close, the island had anthropological connections for me because of Mead and Bateson and Geertz, and I was just looking for some place to have a peaceful vacation and recharge after my first four months of working overseas. I actually didn’t plan on staying in Bali for the whole vacation, I was planning a few weeks here and then a week in Thailand and a few days in Jakarta.

Like many tourists, I ended up in Kuta as my point of entry. Why Kuta? It was close to the airport, and it seemed to be the place where there were a lot of things for a single guy to do. The Merpati plane from Timika landed just as the sun was setting. I wandered around outside the small domestic terminal until I found a taxi and made my way to Bakungsari Cottages in Kuta which is the first place that I stayed in Bali. After a week of wandering around Denpasar, Kuta, and Legian, I made my way up north via bus.

I boarded the wrong bus and ended up going up north on a beautiful road through Pupan, rather than through the middle of the island through Bedugal like I had planned. By the time that I figured out where I was, I was almost out of the Lovina strip. I jumped off the bus just down the road from the Bali Taman in Anturan. I ended up moving a few days later to a small homestay in Kalibukbuk for the grand price of $2 a day. After a week in Kalibukbuk and Anturan, I cancelled my plans for Thailand and Jakarta. I spent the rest of my time in the north of Bali hanging out with my new Balinese friends.

From there, I was just taken, like so many are for some reason that is actually quite hard to explain completely rationally, with Bali and knew that I wanted to live there on a full-time basis at some point in my life.

The rest of the story follows fairly quickly from there; I built my first house, met the woman whom I married a year later, built another house, started having children, built another house, changed jobs a few times, moved to another island, built another two houses, retired and moved the family back here. That sums up as neatly as possible the past 19 years.

Why am I still here? That’s a good question. Just today one of my correspondents said, “oh, you’re still in Bali, you must really love it.”

I replied, “Yes, I do,” But as I think about this reply. I keep wondering why.

Find out what my answer is in the next post.

The Practicalities of Moving to Bali: A Primer for Life in the Tropics

The tropics. Paradise. Exotic. Asian women. Surfer boys.
Love in the tropics. Retiring in Asia. Mai Tais. Bali. What great images!
These words are some of the top search terms that people have used
on the way to accessing my writings, websites, blogs, magazine articles
and podcasts about life in Indonesia, Bali, Sumbawa, and Papua. Over
the past 19 years of writing about life in Bali, I’ve received thousands
of emails asking me about the practicalities of moving here. Some of
the letters have been quite specific like, “Can I bring my dogs to
Bali?” Some have been general like, “I’d like to move to Bali, please
tell me how to go about it.” Some have been vague like, “What’s paradise
like? I’m moving there.”

I’ve tried to answer all of these questions and queries,
but just as I answer one group of letters another group arrives with pretty
much the same questions. It’s this situation that’s led me to write this
eBook about life in Bali.

Why write an eBook about this?

There is an incredible amount of information floating
around both in print and on the Internet about living in Indonesia, but it’s
generally fragmented, and a lot of it is out of date. A popular website about
living in Indonesia has information from 2004. Things change quickly in Indonesia
these days, and if you’re planning on moving to Bali, it’s best to have the
most recent information available. I’ve chosen the ebook format, because
it allows me to collect everything in one place, and to publish it while
the information is still fresh.

Try using a paperback guidebook. They have a lot of uses:
they contain a lot of information about culture and background and
prices for hotels and transport and food; they give you medical information
and photos; you can carry them in your backpack. But, the main problem
with the traditional travel guidebook is that they age quickly, and
the information is written for tourists, not for potential residents.

I’ve had a home in Bali since 1989 and have lived on several
other islands in addition to Bali. During this time, I’ve built five
houses, had four children, and taught in three schools around the country.
The information in this book is based on my experiences over almost
two decades of living and working in Indonesia. In 128 pages, I cover
the basics of what life is like in Bali on a daily basis – health,
communication, finances, culture, visa regulations, the legalities of
purchasing property, education, shopping, love and marriage, and much
more. You will find:

* Chapter 1: Moving to Asia: Why Leave Home?
* Chapter 2: Living in Bali: The Practicalities
* Chapter 3: Romance in the Tropics
* Chapter 4: Children and Schools
* Chapter 5: Housing
* Chapter 6: Property Issues
* Chapter 7: Visas
* Chapter 8: Bali: The Regions
* Chapter 9: Balinese Culture
* Chapter 10: Employment
* Chapter 11: Bali Resources

I’m continually amazed by the number of people that show
up in Bali and expect to live a life of ease in paradise all based
on one or two tourist trips. Daily life in Bali is far different from
the tourist experience: a lot better in many ways, but also hectic
and trying in others. If you are planning on moving to Bali, or thinking
about moving to Bali, you can buy this book for just $15.00 and find
out what’s in store for you before you move to Bali.

Once you read this book, you will be ready for the
big move to Bali. I thank you for the patronage. Click here to get
a free sample chapter.

Here's what a reader has said about this book:

"Bruce Pohlman's e-book has already been a godsend to my wife Elsha and me. He writes in an inviting and colorful way. He covers the GENERAL: culture shock, the wonders and risks of living overseas, to the SPECIFIC - costs of living, housing, medical issues, visas, employment. He even includes much PERSONAL info: what expats are like, why he left a job in San Francisco and ended up in Bali, personal and family relationships. And much more; anything you might want to know is in his e-book, with links to helpful websites throughout. We've used it to guide us countless times; it's like having a trusted uncle who's an expert.This book should become a classic about Bali."

The Practicalities of Moving to Bali

$15.00

If you wish to purchase a copy, click here

A Return to Blogspot

Well, it seems that, despite the fact that I haven't posted here in quite some time due to not being able to use blogger from school when I was working there, there is still traffic coming in here. So, I will be posting here as well as to my other blogs. Look for something new tomorrow.