Okay to begin with can I ask, how many bastardizations of "To be or not to be" have there been....how many have I made?? Hahaha
Aaaaaannnnyyywaayyyy.....scooters.
Walking to work every day for a week I have realized that the sidewalks in Bali (or at least Denpasar) might be more dangerous than the roads. Walking even 15 minutes can feel like you are playing a game with the Reaper. Firstly, there aren't always sidewalks. The sidewalk placement is sporadic at best; one side of the street can have sidewalks and the other can have nothing or a sidewalk can abruptly end leaving the walker suspended in a state of where now. Secondly, if you do find a sidewalk there are no guarantees that it will be intact. Walking to work is sometimes the most exciting part of my day, I look at it like a memory game of sorts. You have to remember what slabs are okay to walk on, which ones felt a little wobbly yesterday and which ones have just plain vanished or cracked in half. The missing ones are my favourite because you actually know what you are getting with them. The ones that seem fine and the ones that are a little wobbly are where you have problems because if I have learned anything from my 2 weeks in Bali, its is not to trust anything. That sounds worse than I meant it to, I don't mean that people in Bali aren't trustworthy, I guess I mean is that there are always surprising little extras. Every step I am waiting for the last step before a slab goes and I fall into the open drain below it. I have seen into these drains. Believe me, you DO NOT want to fall into them. Not that I can think of any reason that any drain would be pleasurable to fall into.
Plus walking you are at the mercy to everyone that you walk past and it might seem a little mean but I am really sick of saying Hello to every person I walk past in a day. Wow, I am a dick. These people are saying "Hello" to me and all I can think is "Crap, I have to say hello to someone else".
All this taken into consideration with the fact that it will soon be about 40 degrees everyday, I decided to get a scooter. I can hear the gasps from everyone who knows me quite well and has seen the bruises that I can get from falling over while standing completely still. I am not taking this decision lightly and I am practicing before I go out and play in traffic.
I rented the bike off a "friend" of Darmi's (she is a lady who's restaurant I go to almost every night and she is helpfully teaching me Indonesian). I say "friend" because I am pretty sure everybody in Bali is a "friend" to everyone else. This friend had to ask Darmi her name so I am guessing that they are pretty tight. But whatever it worked out useful for me. So this lady who's name I totally forget drove me the 2 minutes back to my place and showed me how to work the bike. I'm not sure if it is just me that found this problem but it is very hard to maneuver a scooter or bike in tight spaces and at slow speeds. This attempt at riding my scooter in my driveway while really not knowing what I was doing had the rental lady and her son (?) in stitches. But they thankfully tried to hide it from me, which I thought was kind of them.
Left in the possession of her "very best" bike, I decided that the thing to do was to drink away the nerves and wait til the next morning and practice on the streets.
I woke up at 5am and tentatively started the bike and tried to get it out of the driveway. A helpful little frog hopping in front of my scooter helped me practice stopping suddenly. What a guy!! Out of the driveway and on the open road, I was free....going about 10 miles an hour and my feet sticking out to the sides like a small child whose training wheels have just been taken off. I made it to the bottom of the street with out much difficulty and then remembered that I needed to go back to get home. Zooming up the street at my earth shattering , record breaking 10 miles an hour I was passed in no particular order: a man pulling a garbage can, a teenager on a bike and a 2 legged puppy who was walking on its front paws....Okay I might have made that last one up. BUT I made it home and didn't fall off, that's the main thing.
The next day I did the same thing and woke up at 5am when the roads were still relatively quiet, so I decided to venture off my street and on to the more busy road that crosses with it. Oh yes on Tuesday I was learning how to turn corners!! I know! Turning the wide corner on to the main road I felt on top of the world. I had made it around a corner with out putting my feet on the road to guide me or to keep me from pummeling the 2 feet to my inevitable death on the road below. My new sense of adventure lead my down the road, but I wasn't feeling THAT adventurous so I turned on to a road that I know fairly well from my daytime jaunts around the hood....What I didn't know is that this street is where they have the night market. Now in Bali the night market runs from about 10pm to whenever they feel like closing in the morning (so after 5am). So now not only do I have to try and make sense of this new bike, I have to look out for people, carts and other bikes. I firmly put my feet down about this situation....no really. I kiddy-pushbiked it through the market. Feeling exhilarated at my brush with a crowded marketplace, I went home to get ready for work.
This morning was day 3 of my learning experience and I know knew to miss out the market street so I went a little bit further and went up the next main street. Yeah, that wasn't the next main street...It was what they call a "gang" in Bali. So basically a narrow street or alley off a main street with houses on either side. But what the heck, I like an adventure until you ride a bit to far and disturb two sleeping dogs who jump up and start growling at you. My mind was racing at how if I had to, I could pick up the bike and throw it at the dogs. But I managed to turn the bike around in time and race home. I was going to try riding my bike to school today but I got home and noticed my gas gauge was almost on empty. Maybe tomorrow.....hahahaha
The past few days walking to work I have been observing and trying (unsuccessfully) to learn the rules of the road in Bali. The only thing that I have understood so far is, there are no rules. There is a sense of "this is my space and this is yours. If you are going to slowly in front of me I will beep once and go around of you". It is an organized chaos. I can deal with organized chaos, my life is organized chaos. It is a state that I understand well. Plus I really have no prior driving knowledge to get in the way so I figure that I will go back to Canada and be the best driver there......
xx
No comments:
Post a Comment