I went to Bali!

This year, we went to Bali for a family wedding. We spent 2 weeks there together, and I spent a third week by myself in Ubud. The first week was just my wife and I, and we were at a very nice resort on the beach. We spent the week with a mixture of drinking cocktails on the beach and exploring the island on a rented scooter.

For those who ride motorcycles, riding in Bali (and SE Asia generally) is great. The riding is intuitive and drivers know to expect you. As long as you’re following whatever the locals do, it’s quite relaxing. Getting caught in the rain storms wasn’t great, though.

We did some touristy things, and spent a day or two exploring the rice paddies:

I was really excited to learn gamelan while I was there. I have always wanted to know more about gamelan, but had never really had the opportunity to learn.

I ended up taking 2 lessons from locals - one with various mental gamelan, and the other with wooden gamelan. I learned through this experience that gamelan represents the single instrument as well as a group of instruments - this is indicative of a deeper cultural value in Balinesian culture.

Here’s what the wooden gamelan that I practiced on looked like:

And here’s what a full metal gamelan group looks like. I did not practice on these, but on a similar set.

Some fun facts about gamelan orchestra:

• Gamelans in one group will not have the right tuning to be played in another group.
• Tuning is judged based on the wavering between the same “note” struck on two different metal gamelans that are slightly detuned from one another.
• The tunings of gamelans are not tuned to a particular pitch, but are tuned against one another to have a very precise amount of detuning - typically causes ~7 wavers per second.
• Every instrument in the orchestra is detuned against the others to have a precise amount of waver