Bali Dreaming in the Rice Fields

Spent Tuesday (July 24) visiting Ayu's parent's new villa near Kramask (sp? - Ayu - please correct this for me). In the SE area of the island on the road between Sanur and Candidasa.
What an amazing place they have built up since just February of this year. Three houses, with a visionary Learning Center in the middle of the complex. Agung has a vision to help his childhood village to engage more in Learning, by integrating this into their daily activities, working in the rice paddies.















Would love to share more pics here, but that would take up too much realestate. Have to link over to Kodakgallery, when I can get these loaded back home.

Checking in from Philippine Maid Terminal in Singapore - aka "Budget Terminal"

It's 11:30pm and we have learned about a whole new side of Singapore this evening. If you thought about it, you might guess that it must exist, but, well, who thought about it before?! Anyway, here we are at the Budget Terminal, just a short bus ride away from the Terminal 1 and 2 where the likes of Singapore Airlines and all the other big guns fly in and out of.
Guess who flies out of here? Cebu Pacific and Tiger Airlines. Midnight flights to destinations across Asia that highlight where all the migrant workers come from and go to, to work.
Made it here from Bali earlier in the evening, and the met up with Jenella for a great Thai dinner near the Arrival area. Caught up with Jenella on news from Singapore and adventures in Bali.
Now we're off to a completely new adventure. None of us have ever been to the Philippines before, so we can't even imagine what lies ahead. We don't even know enough, to know what to look forward to, other than it's 6 more days of vacation, and that surely is a great thing.
Mei-Chiang promises to meet us at the airport at 4am inspite of our best efforts to try to pursuade her to please just send the driver and get some sleep herself.

Note to HP readers: I read in the Jakarta Post this morning that the secret of the ending had been released prior to the book. Anyone know about that? Daniel is still slogging his way through it, and Heidi is going back for more,,, grazing through various chapters again. I'm with Mike Robinson, who apparently got stuck on book #4. After the kids learned how to read themselves I was relieved of the out-loud-nightly ritual, phweewww.
OK --- 3 mins left on the "free internet" clock,,, after which I will be automatically logged off.
Bye for now. More from Manila, where I will maybe have access to the same kind of super connections Rhonda is enjoying in Hawaii.
Love from The Krausteads in transit in Singapore... bye

Picture dilemna in Bali - Learnings for Week TWO

We'll be at the airport in Singapore for 5 hours on Friday evening (all part of the super-cheap ticket scheme we have going!), where I will have great internet access but no access to the USB port. So I thought I'd be real clever and bite the bullet here in Bali and load a bunch of pics from my camera, that I could then add text to at the airport. Great idea, hey?
WRONG..... I've just spent the last 20 mins on various failed (presumably timed-out) attempts to get a single picture loaded. Bummer.
I have been thinking a lot about our colleagues in various parts of the world with low band-width access and how this distances them from us and our attempts to increase collaboration.
So here are the learnings for this week:
1) Texting via phones --> figure this out and test this in advance. I know that the information on how to do this is hidden here in the Bahasa interface, but my Euro-centric language abilities prove to be completely useless in Asia
2) When selecting a blog service provider --> find one that is truly international. It seems that I must be trying to connect to servers somewhere on the other side of the Pacific,,,, don't know for sure, but it's very painful.
3) Breakdown and bring some sort of device to capture input offline --> I resisted dragging us down with PC equipment, but I have heard of smaller PDA-type devices that backpacker bloggers use, and that would have been interesting to investigate.
Enough techno-frustrations ... more on the great, great, great experiences from Bali when I get to Singapore in 24 hrs.
Can't wait to read all the comments too. I see that Karen, Rhonda and Betsy are faithful contributors. Somehow I'm not surprised !

Love The Krausteads .... going back out to the beach, where a massive Indian wedding is taking place. The rich and famous are here from around the world.... we are on the pauper sidelines with the Dutch, German and Japanese (no Americans to be seen in these parts)

Flashback to 2400 baud dial-in from Bali

Just took us 20 mins to look at 2 emails in aol... the rest will have to wait until we return to Singapore.
Bali has been fabulous so far. Clear skies, beautiful, pristine beaches, lovely smiles, flowers, on and on ... The weather has been much cooler than expected, so I have used my sweater every evening sitting outside. If we had bothered to check this out a bit better, we would have learned that this is the cooler season. Has not put a damper on any beach activities.
Lots of sleeping, napping, swimming, jogging, volleybal on the beach, reading (Yes, Heidi finished Harry Potter lickety-split), chess (life size pieces), smoothies served under grass huts on the beach.
Today we have a contract with the beach bums (i.e. our kids) to leave this paradise for a one-day site-seeing adventure. We're going to KlungKung palace on the East side, and then over to visit Ayu Pramitassari, a friend of ours from SEA Stripes days, who actually comes from Bali. Her family is here this week staying at their villa, as there is a cremation on one of her older aunts. Kids said no more Balinese creamations, so we'll just visit with Ayu and her husband Yuri. Hopefully we'll also get to see Ayu's parents.
No pics today .... would take we 10 mins to just load one at this rate. Will have to work on that some other day. Probably from Singapore airport, or at Mei-Chiang's in Manila.
Sleeping on the beach until next posting .... Love the Krausteads

The moustache was voted off the island

Not very clear from the pics posted, but Kip has been trying to grow a moustache (am I spelling this right?). Good news for me and Heidi is that he agreed to shave it off this morning. No more Asian bandido persona travelling with us.
We're having a quick bite before leaving for the airport to hop over to Bali ...

More from Bali, Lynn

p.s. Heidi is almost half-way through the HP book, and promises no more spoilers. Robinson girls please advise when you have finished, so you guys can discuss the plot!

Blogger Learnings - Week One

For the "LIFE" team and other passionate Learners back home:
Behaviors: Recommend that you provide instructions on posting comments and how/when you plan to write, to accompany your invitations to read. Most of our invitees are not familiar with blogging and don't always understand how they can interact with the blog. We keep getting lots of great comments coming to us in our email account instead of directly into the blog.
Another learning for me as the writer, is that I don't really have time to learn and experiment on the road. Often don't get more than 5 or 10 mins windows of time to quickly load something.
Process: Recommend that you figure out how the time-zones will impact your posting. Just learned after a week that I can specify the time-zone for the daily time-stamp. The 12 hour delay has actually been a benefit for my daily posting ritual, as I can write the blog for the previous day the next morning and have the automatic time stamp be correct.
Tools: Recommend that you get more practice than I had before I started on this adventure. Need to figure out some tricks and workarounds to such things as a) how to upload multiple pics at the same time b) how to change the language interface if you are presented with something other than English. c) bring a cheat sheet with additional html commands to help with the formatting.

Heidi and Daniel plough into Harry Potter

Heidi is forever grateful for Ade's foresight in reserving the Harry Potter book for her in Jakarta. She got started right away at lunch and they both returned to the room as soon as was politely possible to dig in deep. She told me mid-afternoon that 2 characters had already died .... could be a "downer" kind of a day tomorrow, when she crosses the finishing line!