The Little Details

This will be my last post about Bali. (At least until the next vacation!)

I took a lot of pictures of the little details. I am not sure if I was so entranced by Bali that even the little details seemed wonderful or if all of the wonderful little details were part of what entranced me, but either way I came away with the idea that Bali is the best place on the planet.

There was the tray of chocolate covered treats, along with a welcome note and a bottle of wine that was waiting for us in our room when we arrived.

We chose to enjoy the treats that evening in the outdoor living room.

The wine was chilling in a wooden bucket. I loved the bucket.

It became sort of a joke between Eric and I that I wanted to bring home everything from the villa. (I actually did purchase some of the bathroom accessories! After returning home I said I should have purchased the pillow because it was heavenly. Since returning home I have purchased THREE different pillows hoping to find something I like as well. Nothing I have tried yet compares to that pillow! I did NOT ask if I could purchase the wine bucket. Sometimes I regret that.)

Our first morning I woke obscenely early so got my camera and went outside. I captured this picture of our plunge pool. I love the colors.

Thatched roof detail.

Remember the outdoor shower that I loved so very much?

I am showing it again not because the memory of it causes me to melt (it does, and it is wonderful!) but by way of explaining the next picture. It is a close up of the shower wall.

I actually took SEVERAL pictures of the rock wall. Can you believe it? Truly I think Bali put me in an artistic state of mind. I contemplated the different colors in the stone, the abstract pattern in which it was laid and the slight variations in texture. I took pictures so that I could look at them and be inspired to... do what I am not sure! And no, I wasn't smoking anything funny. (Never have.)

For somewhat the same reasons, I took this close-up picture of the dining room buffet. Unless you get close you don't see the layers of finish, it just looks like a honey-colored wood. Only on close inspection did I see that there was some green underneath the stain. I suppose when next I refinish a piece of furniture I will incorporate this technique, which was the reason for the photograph. (Except I don't refinish furniture either.)

A very comfortable, weather-resistant living room chair.

The living room daybed...

...which was layered with beautiful pillows.

(I took photos of many of the pillows individually, but I don't want to bore anyone into a stupor.)

This was a garden light along the courtyard path. Isn't it cute and different?

This is the courtyard path, looking back to the entrance gate.

Here is our gate from the inside:

Just inside the gate is a light switch, set into a concrete stone! I didn't actually mean to photograph the light switch. I was interested in the fact that the wall sort of looked like it was crumbling. I imagine this was done on purpose to give the illusion of being in a grand old property. It works for me since I love OLD things.

Finally, remember I said in the past that I have a new love of doors and gates? Well, I think the doors into every villa were unique; just one more detail to enthrall me. And despite the fact that my kids complained about the number of photographs I took of DOORS, I feel like I did not begin to take enough.

(Yes, I know this last one is a repeat. One in daylight and one at night. I guess I thought it was particularly pretty. I do love the scroll design.
As we were preparing to leave Eric found a couple of postcards in the desk drawer - pictures from the resort. Guess what was pictured? The doors! It is just so amazing to me that this thing which I love was such a feature of the resort. We had no idea about that when we booked the place. We truly had no idea how spectacular the resort was. Yes, the pictures looked REALLY nice, but experience has told us that photographers are quite good at finding a sliver of "nice" and snapping it for the web designer to post on the property's website. Generally we get to a place and are disappointed by something. But this time Eric said the pictures didn't even begin to show how truly beautiful everything was. So true.

Beyond the Villa

We did venture outside of our villa a few times. Around every corner there was something new to take my breath away. This is one of the pathways between villas. A bit of an upgrade from your standard hotel hallway!

There are active volcanoes on Bali, so I am guessing these retaining walls were built using lava rock from around the island.

Around one corner, a lovely little waterfall.

Flowers around every corner.

This flower I have never seen anyplace else. I don't think it shows in the photo, but in real life the flowers looked almost like they were made out of wax.

Bali is predominantly Hindu, a fact which sort of surprises me since most of Indonesia is Muslim. There are Hindu temples everywhere. As a side note, I have to say that the Hindu temples are nowhere near as ornate as the Buddhist temples which we see all over Taiwan. The Hindu temples seem to be mostly a pile of rocks. I began to identify them by a two-tiered golden umbrella-type thing that seemed to always be attached.

There is a temple within the grounds of the resort and it happened to be very near to our villa. One evening I heard a lot of racket coming from the direction of the temple so went to see what the cause of the racket was. (I'm sorry to describe it in less than flattering terms, but I find that the "music" associated with both Hindu and Buddhist religions is very distasteful. It is a cacophony of strange and discordant instruments which seem to all be playing whatever strikes their fancy rather than everyone playing notes that blend together into a beautiful song.) On this particular evening there were temple dancers putting on a show for the guests. I found the costumes to be beautiful.

The dances themselves were not particularly appealing to me, especially the dance performed by the male. It was full of frenzied shaking which, sorry - just being honest here, seemed demonic to me and was therefore not the least bit enjoyable to watch. Nevertheless, interesting to see this bit of another culture.

I still have a few more photos to share. For now I will leave you with a preview of the centerpiece of our NEXT vacation in Bali. Yes, we are returning in December with the kids! The house beyond the pool will be our base camp for exactly half of our time. Eric and I visited and were treated to a lovely lunch by the owners of this little gem. I don't expect the next trip to be as indulgent as the last, but it should be fantastic in it's own way.

Homesick

I'm tired of air conditioners that break at 2:00 a.m. Filled with ice, they sound like a jack hammer in the middle of the room. (Pick whichever room you like. There is no central ventilation system here, each room has it's own air conditioner.)

I'm tired of not being able to have fresh air in the house - EVER - because the screens fit so poorly that they are useless. I suppose they keep out birds, but bugs and lizards are free to come and go as they please.

I'm tired of dreading every necessary outing because it will involve trying to make my point to someone who doesn't understand me - either linguistically or culturally.

I'm tired of... I'm just tired of Taiwan. I have struggled since my return from The States over 2 months ago. I thought it would pass and I would readjust and everything would be okay, but it's not. I want to go home, wherever that is.

AMAZING, AMAZING, AMAZING!

If you have been checking for pictures, I apologize for the long wait. I tried to post last week but had so many problems that I had to delete the whole thing and start over. Hopefully it will go better today.

I will start by just giving a little tour of our villa. It was AMAZING! I cannot say that enough times or strongly enough. Just absolutely out-of-this-world perfect-for-our-taste AMAZING.

Here, the entrance to our villa:

The AMAZINGLY cool wooden doors open into a private little courtyard. I will show detailed pictures of this area in another post.

As you turn from the doors this is the view that greets you:

AMAZING!!!

This is what the ceilings look like:

There were 3 of those ceilings just in our villa: one over the bedroom, one over the bathroom and one over the living/dining area. They look to be all handmade. Eric said he couldn't find a nail or screw anywhere. The craftsmanship is AMAZING.

This is the bed as it is during the daytime:

And this is the bed at night:

Housekeeping comes in each evening to turn down the bed. They also spread the lovely and probably useful mosquito netting around the bed, light some incense to keep the bugs away and turn on lights.

There is a dressing room between the bedroom and bathroom. Do you see the beautiful wood slat doors? On one side of the dressing room is a chest and windows looking into another private courtyard. The other side is closets. Beyond is the start of the bathroom, which is, yes, AMAZING.

You have to look in the above picture to see the bathtub because I didn't take a picture of it. It was beautiful. Next to the tub was a marble top table will all of these wonderful amenities:

There were bath salts, bath gel, some other oil which I mistook for bubble bath (it didn't bubble), a candle and incense. I've never liked incense before but after my experience in Bali I bought a bunch of it to bring home. It now seems blissful, peaceful, AMAZING to me. (Eric says it makes him think of pot-smokers. I told him he would just have to get over that because I don't have that association and I am going to burn incense and dream of Bali! He is okay with that.)

Nothing was presented in a "tacky" plastic bottle. Everything was in ceramic jars, properly labeled.

And although I did not take a picture of the whole bathtub, I did take a close-up of one of the pillows in the tub. There were two. What a wonderful idea! So very relaxing. Each pillow was adorned with a fresh Frangiapani flower. The flowers are everywhere in Bali and they have the most AMAZING scent. Very strong and very beautiful.

If you didn't want to take a bath you could take a shower in this beautiful, modern, clean shower with one of those huge rainwater shower heads.

Lovely as that shower was, we never used it. Instead we used this AMAZING OUTDOOR shower. The memory of this makes me melt. I want to go back to Bali just for this shower. I never would have dreamed I would love it; in fact, I never would have dreamed I would even have TOLERATED an outdoor shower. But this was the most peaceful thing I have ever experienced. Words cannot convey how beautiful the setting was, how wonderful the sound of water pouring out of the bamboo faucet. I hope heaven has showers like this. It must, because this was just absolutely heavenly.

When I left the shower, it was to lounge on the daybed in the living room (pictures in another post) looking through the dining room at this view:

Each day we had a new selection of fresh fruit left on our dining room table.

This isn't the clearest picture, but I love it. See that picture on the wall? It is actually a mirror reflecting flowers on the wall of the bedroom portion of the villa. Another amazing memory for me.

Chaises on our patio. We napped here one day.

Beautiful doors from our bedroom onto the patio. Inside the glass doors you can see a separate set of wood slat doors. They are covered on the outside with screen so that, at night, you could close just the wooden doors, keep the bugs at bay and listen to the surf at night. I'm melting again with the memory.

And finally, because I love little details, a close-up of the door hardware. I loved this place so much that even the door hardware seemed amazingly beautiful to me.I have more pictures - a few of things beyond the villa - that I hope to share soon.

I want to live in Bali. In this villa. Forever. It was simply AMAZING.