The End of the Year in Bali

It’s the last day of 2008 and, as usual, we have all sorts of stuff going on here in our house in Kampung Bugis. Yesterday was the 18th anniversary of my marriage to my wife and today I had to pay my annual marriage tax. My wife asked for a new refrigerator and considering that we have had this one for 10 years, I considered a new fridge to be a good gift. We went over to our usual electronics’ supplier and after a lot of looking and measuring and pricing, bought a LG that is a little larger than our old model. So that was one thing that we did today.

My wife is having the beach house renovated slowly using money that she saves from her annual house budget. So the old fridge was moved to the beach house, and while I was watching the move, I noticed new tiles on the stairs to the second floor, a new window in the kitchen, another small fridge that I didn’t know that we had (I rarely go into the beach house), and new fittings on the windows (for those that might think that we have some luxury villa, our houses here in Kampung Bugis are very basic – a fair amount of space but basic in terms of building materials and design. We definitely won’t win any Bali design awards or end up in one of the coffee table books that highlight Western buildings in Bali, but our houses are functional and comfortable. We have seven children and four adults living in these two houses along with the children’s friends, a pembantu, and the rest of our family that lives in the kampung and they all tend to hang out here.

So we have the new fridge, and then we’ve been cleaning up from yesterday’s big storm. I won’t let anyone change the third floor which is where I live most of the time, and as it’s open, when we get big storms water flows down from the third floor to the second floor and then down to the first floor. It only happens when we have really big storms and yesterday we had one.

I wandered around the Beach House looking at old photos of Su and me when we married, and some of the kids when they were small and my adult son the last time that he was here visiting us. I did get a flash of “my god, I looked so young then.”

And now, another 6 hours before 2009, all the women in the family are in the Beach House kitchen cooking up a feast for the end of the year, the men are moving refrigerators and fixing holes in the roof, the kids are playing , and I’m writing and watching the kittens.

Happy New Year to all.