Bali Getaway

After spending almost the entire past four months locked down in my apartment in Jakarta, it's wonderful to escape to Bali for four days. Staying in an amazing private villa with personal pool. Dinner was a delicious barramundi (Asian sea bass) with vegetarian spring rolls.  Nice to get away.




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

20 Years Ago Today: My New York University 9-11 Experience

Image
Originally Published:  9-11-2021 9-11-2001 seemed like any other beautiful late summer day at the New York University campus at Villa La Pietra in Florence, Italy.  I was responsible for the student life of our campus.  Each semester we housed 100 study abroad students in two of the five villas on our 200 acre estate of gardens and groves of olive trees and cypruses.  And we were also responsible for 300 students scattered throughout the city in apartments NYU leased for them.  As you can tell from the pictures, La Pietra was a romantic Tuscan setting that seemed to come straight from a movie.  Mid-afternoon on the 11th got a call from the Head of Student Life for all the NYU abroad campuses who was situated about 20 blocks from the towers.  He told me that there had been an aviation accident and one of the Twin Towers had been hit.  At that point it sounded like a freak airplane crash.  It was when we learned of the second tower being hit th...
Read more

Erik's Book Club: November Selections

Image
I experienced another wonderful month of reading, six books in all.  Five of them were quite magnificent. The Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi was probably my favorite.  It's a novel that was a finalist for the 2020 Women's Prize for Fiction. It's a philosophical novel of family, religious faith, identity, and science and one women's struggle to understand them all as they apply to her tragic life. It would take a 1000-word review to do the book justice;  I would simply say that I highly recommend it and it's a book worth seeking out. Very different, but as good as Gyasi's novel is: When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut, a finalist for the 2021 Booker Prize. It sounds peculiar: it's a hybrid history/novel retelling the story of crucial discoveries in quantum physics. It's a book that disorients the reader in that, for the first half, it is extremely difficult to determine where fact ends and fiction begins. Ultimately it is a caution...
Read more

The Meaning of a Taco

Image
I have attached a picture of something rather beautiful to this post. To those who live in North America, you are likely to remark, "But that's just a taco."  However fellow expats who have had the experience of residing in the Giant Yellow Spaceship (my nickname for where I used to live), in the barren Kyrgyz mountains, where everything that sustains a person is precious, will understand me when I reply, "there is no 'just a' in the world." While the average North American is seldom more than a 10 minute drive from a cornucopia of tacos and burritos, my life in the GYS often found me hundreds of kilometers from anything resembling a taco or most of its ingredients. I would chuckle to myself whenever someone asked me what my hobby was when I lived in Naryn. I always said traveling or reading as that sounds far less bizarre and is easier to explain than "searching for tacos and burritos." And so I would spend my time searching for ingredients wh...
Read more