Ubud Life: It Took Me 2 Months To Understand This 1 Persistent Question
AUTHOR NOTE: This was written approximately two weeks ago. I am no longer in Ubud.
As my second of two non-consecutive months in Ubud comes to a rapid close, I’ve found myself in a very reflective state these past two days.
When my wife and I first came here in May of this year, I immediately fell in love with the magic of this place. The hype was real. Something about the right combination of weather, scenery, people, food, excursion opportunities and overall energy of Bali spoke to me. When it was time to leave for Tokyo —something that most people would be very excited about —I found myself saying “Do we have to leave yet?”.
Now don’t get me wrong! Japan was amazing, but as awesome as it (and the destinations after it) ended up being, Bali was still the only location that gave me that feeling of not wanting to leave. Therefore, after spending some quality time with my family in Slovakia for three months, I decided to come back here for the majority of November.
This time around proved to be a little bit of a different experience than my maiden voyage here. Aside from the fact that it was a solo trip, it also gave me the chance to make some observations about both the culture of the Balinese people and my interaction with that culture.
When you’re constantly on the go from one country to the next, you don’t get much time to long-term reflect because you are essentially in a permanent state of adaptation. You can do some daily micro-reflections, but it’s not quite the same. As much as I loved it here, once we landed in Japan, I was mentally preoccupied with all the sights and sounds of what I was experiencing there. That’s how it should be anyways — living in the present.
Coming back here again, but without the strong desire to see as much as possible this time, has allowed me to do a lot more thinking.
Waitress: “Where you stay?”
Me: “Excuse me?”
Waitress: “Where you stay?”
Besides the ever-popular “Where you from?” and “Taxi?”, this has got to be the most frequently asked question you will get as a foreigner or tourist in Ubud.
My first experience with it came at what is now my daily restaurant and I have to say that I was taken aback by it initially. The thing is that three different waitresses in the span of maybe ten minutes all asked me this question. Multiple times. I was intentionally vague with my answer, but each and every one of them persisted, trying to get it out of me. The more they did, the more I resisted to tell them. I found it odd and intrusive. Like why do you want to know where I live? Are you gonna come rob me? You don’t need to know where I live. Needless to say that I could not shake this question for the entire month we were here. It didn’t matter where we went.
In the U.S. it’s “death and taxes”.
In Bali it’s “Where you from? and Where you stay?”.
At the time, I thought that my response to their ‘intrusive question’ was rational — to me at least. I didn’t get a chance to really think about it though. It was just my gut feeling which was a result of social conditioning, but Bali is a completely different society with different social norms.
After about a week of constant badgering from probably the entire staff at my now favorite restaurant, I finally asked one of them why they want to know so badly where I’m staying. Not just them, but seemingly everyone in the neighborhood. Her answer was that they give a referral bonus to the owner of wherever I’m staying for ‘recommending their restaurant’. Her answer seemed logical, but I later learned that it was nonsense. I asked my landlady and she said she doesn’t get any referral money from them. A different waitress double confirmed it as well.
So why did she tell me this then?
I speculate that she probably interacted with a digital nomad or two in the past and they likely suggested it to her to grow the restaurant’s business. She probably assumed that I would be able to grasp the reasoning behind this — and she was right. I completely bought into it and believed her. But now that begs the question of — why didn’t she tell me the REAL reason?!?
I began thinking about it again yesterday because I hadn’t been asked in a while now due to following the same routine and interacting with the same people. In other words, everyone I see on a daily basis either already knows ‘where I stay’ or gave up on trying to get it out of me. However, yesterday a new warung (restaurant) opened up near my go-to spot and so I decided to give them some business to support them. Naturally, within the first minute of me walking in I was hit with it —
“So, where you stay?”
Oh boy! Heeeeere we go again.
The funny thing is that for some reason this time I just answered the question. The innate defensiveness that I had felt before seemingly disappeared.
It felt normal just to answer the question.
I thought about it afterwards. Did the Balinese people just wear me down to the point where I just gave up?
No. It was something else.
It was what I had learned about their culture and somehow processed on a subconscious level. Through interactions with my landlady and her family, my driver, the waitresses and staff in various restaurants and other locals, I learned that Balinese people place extreme importance on family. You are not ‘you’, but you are a member of some family. They are so connected to their family that they even pay daily respects to their dead ancestors (and also Hindu Deities). Everywhere you go, you will see shrines and offerings with rituals being performed every morning to appease the spirits.
Part of the purpose of these rituals is to “achieve the state of selamat, a condition of safety and equilibrium between the visible world of humans and the invisible world of spirits.” (1)
It’s this idea that everything is connected. We are connected to each other. We are connected to animals and the earth. We are also connected to those who live in the spirit world.
After thinking about all of this, I’ve come to the conclusion that when Balinese people ask you where you stay, what they really want to know is where they should place you in this web of families and neighborhoods. They obviously know that you are not from here so you aren’t from a family, but they want to connect you to something in the community. The next closest thing is the family that you are living with. Of course this is only my personal theory and it’s a difficult conversation to have with any Balinese person that I know, because they only speak basic English. Not enough to talk about a topic like this. I imagine that the waitress who gave me the made-up reason about referrals realized that she wouldn’t be able to adequately explain these cultural norms so she fed me something I could digest instead.
This interconnectedness of Balinese society is pervasive and shows up in so many other ways.
For example, two things I’ve personally observed are their handling of ‘house pests’ and the concept of ‘house locks’.
Being that Ubud is in the jungle and all, there are many wild animals and insects that live here. Occasionally, those creatures try to make their way inside homes. While most people in the West would deal with this by trying to find a way to kill the animal or insect, Balinese people instead search for ways to deflect them or deter them. They understand that the animals that live among them also have a right to the land and should not be killed. I suspect that on some level, their animist beliefs play a role in why they behave this way. Whatever the reasoning behind it is, it’s nice to see.
As for house locks, I learned that they only started using those after Westerners started coming here in droves. Not-so-coincidentally, incidences of theft also went up with the arrival of Western visitors and cultural norms. Traditionally, Balinese people didn’t lock their doors and neighbors were very ‘kumbaya’ with each other. It’s funny because when I think about my puny little house lock, it really is borderline pointless. If I really wanted to, I could easily break into my villa. For some reason though, I still feel psychologically better when I use it.
I may have gotten over the uneasy feeling of being asked where I stay, but I still can’t let go of the safety I feel from using a symbolic, functionally pointless lock. Something tells me that I never will. Some conditioning is just that deep.
KEY TAKEAWAYS: We all operate from a place that has some built-in cultural bias based on our social conditioning. If someone says something to you or asks you a question that you find offensive —especially if traveling outside of your home culture — try to be polite about how you respond until you get a chance to learn more information. Your first reaction or gut reaction might not be as accurate as you think.
That doesn’t mean that you don’t have a right to feel uncomfortable, but after the initial interaction, try to do some more research. If the person you are interacting with speaks a good enough level of English and you feel it is appropriate, maybe even ask them directly. Perhaps they will share some insight with you that may make you think about their question in an entirely different way.
Although this may seem to be mostly relevant to interacting with people while traveling, it can be very applicable even in your home country. If you live in a modern, multi-cultural city and you have diversity among your work staff, you could have a similar experience. As a general rule of thumb, whether you are abroad or at home, I recommend you take your time to PLUR —process, learn, understand and reassess.
LAST NOTE: If you are Balinese or if you have intimate knowledge of Balinese cultural norms and you wish to shed some further insight on this topic, please do so. I wrote this as a personal reflection and with only two months of experience on the island. I am very open to the idea that my interpretation may very well be inaccurate.
(1) https://scholar.colorado.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2830&context=honr_theses
