Bali Violence

I normally don't like company trips because the Shopping Aunties scare me. These women are usually from the Finance department. But occasionally, there will be one or two members of the Account Management and Creative departments in their midst.
Gifted with unadulterated perseverance and the gene to "succeed" (plus spontaneous acting skills), they can make the merchants feel guilty for even asking for your money.

Recently the company I work for decided to take its staff to Bali. You know, the country that got bombed twice? The tour operator told us that the number of tourists had dropped from 5 000 to 1450 per day. But did this stop the Shopping Aunties from bargaining their teeth off? No. RM20 for sequinned sandals? Let's make it RM6 shall we? Handcrafted glass-chipped wooden bowl for RM40? Shucks, that's a REAL bomb ain't it?

What you don't see from this blog is the drama surrounding the whole act of bargaining. There's plenty of push and pull involved. They push the old, craggy artisans and if they don't like what they hear, they literally pull away from the shop, which is usually preceded by a threat or a snort of disbelief.

Needless to say, they got into some heated arguments with these locals who are probably still casting long-distance spells on us.




These Aunties also have a penchant for visiting as many tourist spots as possible in a day. "But we paid RM35 for a whole day!!" And so they invade the Monkey Forest Parks, Tanah Lot, the temple in the lake, some paddy fields, some silver and gold factories while cramming marathon shopping sprees in between.

You can't miss them. Their voices are larger than life and the original

Sensing the latent explosives in these Aunties, I decided from day one to hang out with a small bunch of guys from the Creative department, which included an Account Director. Sure the stations took Beavis and Butthead off the air but they were well and alive in our company.

At the first company dinner, they saw fit to stack up some wooden chairs into some gigantic Jenga game to the amusement of the waiters. The latter's smiles ceased when they left the chairs in their Frank Gehry state. At the airport, they decided it was much more fun to ram a trolley into a stacked pile of luggage, than to wait patiently for the boarding passes to be issued. All this interspersed with crude jokes about every person who walked past.

Aside from frequent urges to slap them with monkeys from the Forest Parks, I managed to be civil and controlled. Found a great bottle green beaded lamp with a 40kg glass base for RM130. And a huge painting for RM80. Ignored their snide remarks about my handicapped bargaining skills which I do admit are pretty non-existent.

I also managed to enjoy my simple lunch of a chicken wrap amidst their cackling over the word "Sop Buntot" on the menu. For 3 hours.

There are plenty of cute cafes and restaurants spread around Seminyak, Kuta and Ubud. All serve a mixture of authentic Indonesian food and western. None, willing to cook Beavis nor Butthead, unfortunately.