August 26, 2017 – 3:03 PM
My Bali internet connection speeds are glacially slow… at least when I am able to connect. There’s a lot of dropping the connection, both on WiFi and on my Sprint International Roaming. I suppose one could say it’s dropped like it’s hot; this is because, well, it *is* hot. And humid. My weather app which had shown temperatures topping out at 80 degrees and lows at night around 65 must’ve been fed false information because that is NOT what’s happening here. It’s no Da Nang but dang! it’s not far off either.
I’m writing stuff here and there, trying to capture the flavor of the moment and the experience. And while perhaps I should use this opportunity to embrace a more text based approach, I can’t seem to quit the overuse of digital photos to try and convey things… and to obscure the many, may literary shortcomings of the prose itself.
So what I thought I might do is post a quick bit of verbiage and maybe one or two photos when possible, a sort of teaser campaign or behind the scenes to at least put something into the inter-verse while saving the bulk of updates for when I get a more stable and robust connection.
This is already creating paradoxes though as I spent this morning drafting a wordy blog post that somewhat encapsulates a few of these points while prattling on and on about the prior day’s 12.5 hour tour. But I’m not posting that as it really does need some photos to sell it and thus there will be this weird repetition and déjà vu when I do ultimately get it up and online. Meh. The three of you who read this thing will just have to deal with it in your own ways. I recommend copious amounts of gelato. Like this one:
Yeesh. That is one bad photo, Harry. To be fair, I had just gotten off a white water raft.
There’s your behind the scenes pic for August 25, 2017.
And here’s one for August 26, 2017.
Today I went to the Bali Marathon packet pickup, promised a 21st century experience that would redefine the modern marathon expo. You know what that meant? They handed us wristbands that we could load money onto as points to buy food and merchandise. My take on this? That’s some bitcoin bullshit in more than one way. First, you couldn’t actually use paper money – you could only load amounts onto the wrist band via a credit card or debit card. And the money wasn’t money, it was converted to points, valued at 10,000 Indonesian Rupiah. And so everything at the expo was priced in points… or occasionally priced in Rupiah making you THINK you could pay in cash but no, you needed to go to a cashier and get “points” loaded onto your wrist band to buy the food/shirt/coffee/beer/etc.
I had already converted once from US dollars to Rupiah. I wasn’t about to convert more US Dollars into Rupiah equivalent Points that were only valid today at this expo. Oh, and there was a minimum 50,000 Rupiah “buy in.” That would’ve been easy to spend on the items in question – a Coke Zero was 2 points or 20,000 Rupiah, less than I paid at the Elephant Safari but way more than at the local supermarkets (a can goes for 7,000 Rupiah or equivalent “0.7 points”; a 1.5 L bottle is 14,500). I opted instead to wander around a bit outside the expo and though I paid more than my dinner last night (which cost the same as that 1.5 L Coke Zero) but was a pleasant way to spend some time.
I could post a shot from that lunch but instead here’s a shot of me winning a tee-shirt from a vendor. To spin I had to correctly identify two industries the company was involved in. The hostess pointed me to the signage behind her for “hints.” The problem was, it was all in Indonesian. She gave me one in that they did hotels… I puzzled out a word that kinda looked like “libro” and guessed they were into books or publishing. They were so I got to spin… and avoided the whammy of nothing to pocket a t-shirt that only has Indonesian text on it. I suspect it says, “I won this shirt at the Hotel/Book Booth of the Bali Marathon.” If it doesn’t, that’s what I’m going to tell everyone it says and unless they use their babel fish/google translator I should totally be able to sell that.
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NOTE: Hati Hati means “caution” or “careful” or “mind this” or some variation. I see it on road construction signs all over here… and there is A LOT of construction going on here. Oh, sod it. Here’s a second behind the scenes photo to illustrate my point:
Pre-Posting Post-Blogging Note: It took me almost three hours to upload the photos on this page.