Today we transfer from Manggis to Ubud.  Manggis is ocean-side, but Ubud is up in the mountains, so it should be quite different.  Furthermore, our hotel here is rather isolated, so it’s hard to just venture into a town to do some browsing.  Our hotel in Ubud should be closer to the action.

Ubud is known for being an artsy town in Bali.  We should have a good opportunity to see some traditional arts, paintings, sculpture, weaving, dancing, and music.  It’s going to be neat.

We took a cooking class with the chef at our hotel yesterday.  It was pretty freaking cool.  We now have six more recipes for Balinese fish curry, Balinese fish satay, a salad, steamed chicken parcels in our un-findable banana leaves, green Balinese crepes with coconut/palm sugar filling, and an all-purpose Balinese spice paste.  We will post them all, never fear, and we think that anyone in the States interested in reproducing them would be able to do so with little trouble.

A final note on Balinese food versus Javanese and Sumatran food: we find the Balinese style of cooking to be quite spicy, not only hot like Sumatran food, but with a ton of actual spices.  It’s good, but quite different, and even we have found it necessary to get acclimated to this style of cooking.