Bali for My Birthday

Sometimes (like every day) I wonder if this life in China is worth it. I hate being so far away from family,  being on different continents is hard. Living in a place that doesn't speak English is hard. Not having comfort food at arms reach is hard (food is very very important to me, if you haven't noticed already.) And sometimes, my job is hard.

But, overall my job isn't bad. I am not taking work home with me each night like a teacher in the US would. My kids and I have finally started to get in the groove (geesh, it only took 7 months). I don't (normally) work weekends. Besides a summer holiday, we got a month off in the winter. A MONTH OFF! Talk about perfect timing too. My parents had just left, but before I could get too sad, we had another family visitor. Josh's 16 year old brother Jonathan came to travel with us in Southeast Asia. And it was time for the most epic birthday of my life.

Our original plan was to go to Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and India. But, because we're dummies, Josh and I didn't realize that we didn't have enough visa pages in our passports to get an Indian visa and we ran out of time to get new pages put in. Instead, we sought out countries that gave visas on arrival.

The new itinerary:
Indonesia (Islands of Bali and Java)
Thailand (Phuket)
Malaysia (Kuala Lumpur)
A week back in Crapland (We flew to southern China and took a train to Shanghai)

Let's begin, shall we?

Hangzhou, China

Our flight out of the country left from Hangzhou, a city about 2 hours south of Shanghai.. Since we haven't really seen much of China since moving here, we took an early train to spend the day in a new city. Hangzhou was pretty lame. There was a big lake and nothing else. I was just so anxious to get out of China, I thought we were just wasting time. We spent the day walking around, taking pictures, and hanging out in KFC. That pretty much sums up our trip to Hangzhou.

The Emerging Gold Bull

Wow, beautiful pink flowers in the middle of winter!

....wait a second!

When I saw the couple changing their baby's dirty diaper on the table in the restaurant, I knew I was done with Hangzhou. Seriously, that's disgusting!

Brittany's Brilliantly Bodacious Bali Birthday Bonanza

Is that overkill? Nah.

We arrived in Bali super early on the morning of my birthday (January 28). The landing strip in Bali is super duper scary. In fact, just recently there was a plane that overshot the landing and crashed into the water. Luckily, that was not us! The woman who checked me in even wished me a happy birthday (Thanks, lady!) And off we were through the immigration line. Josh and Jon went before me. Josh and I were both crossing our fingers that they would let us in even though we had no more empty pages left in our passports. Josh went through just fine. I approached the attendant's desk and handed over my passport. He flipped through the whole book several times. Then he left the desk to go into an office. I looked at Josh and Jon wide-eyed. Are they seriously not letting me through?! Ohmygoshohmygoshohmygosh! A few minutes later, he came back. "Are you traveling alone?" he asked. "No, I'm with my family," I pointed to the guys. He looked at me with disapproval and gave me a little lecture. "You need to get a new passport, you have no more empty pages." Then, he squeezed the half page visa on a page that already had a few stamps on it. Whew, that was close! Apparently Josh's attendant didn't even look at his passport and just stuck the visa on an endorsement page.

Josh haggled and got a decent price on a taxi, who took us to Kuta Beach. Our taxi driver was named Ketut. I'm sure you're thinking, Wow, what are the odds? That's the name of the medicine man that Elizabeth Gilbert met in "Eat, Pray Love."  The odds are are quite high actually. (Sidenote: my dear friend Bri also traveled to Bali and met THE Ketut. Read about her adventure: here)

Once we arrived at Kuta Beach (completely overrun with tourists), we took a ferry to a smaller island off of Bali called Nusa Lembongan. Of course, the men running the ferry were willing to find us accommodations at their pal's hotel. We were taken to a beautiful resort on Mushroom Bay. It was pretty much out of our price range ($30, true story) but we were exhausted from our overnight travel, that we decided to stay a night or two.

Our whole trip wasn't great. But that first day in Bali was completely magical to me. Just thinking of it now brings such joy to my heart. It was the perfect birthday. We were out of China.We were in a tropical paradise. And we had the entire hotel to ourselves. Perfect.

And.... things pretty much went downhill from here.