So what better reason to break into a five star hotel?

Driving up to the valet point in our rusting hunk of metal should have outed us as not that rich but the dudes with the wavy bomb detector things let us on through. They even parked our pringle encrusted car for us (hey I got hungry on the way and it wasn’t like we could afford to actually eat there).

We strolled on through the grounds as if heading for the helipad down by our own private villa and then took a sharp left to the pool.

Check it out. Good job non?

 

After a swim we mooched on out of there. We spent the rest of the afternoon eating. John organized a raw food picnic. This is amusing because a year ago the only thing I’d eat raw was cow – and the occasional fish – vegetables most definitely cooked. I was the serve it up still mooing give me some bleeding flesh girl. I was so carnivorous that I’d walk past sacred cows in India and start smelling the mustard. Yet here I am not only not turning my nose up, but actually choosing to order the raw chocolate cake over the proper chocolate cake – probably because RAW also seems to denote NO CALORIES and INSTANT KARMA POINTS in my head making it thus ok to eat five slices because the more I eat the thinner I’ll get and the better my next life will be.

Anyway after the raw food picnic we got massaged. I feel disloyal to massage Wayan saying this – but hey she’s never going to read this – this massage truly was the best massage I’ve ever had. I thought they were going to need to hose me up at the end of it. I contemplated handing over my life savings and telling them to just keep going until they ran out, sometime in mid 2011 but I’m glad I didn’t because then I would have missed the wasabi eating competition that came later.

wasabi makes your eyes go blurry.

Just after this, amidst our raw fish feeding frenzy, (we were eating Japanese), a girl in a white turban, dressed all in white, with requisite dangly jewellery, wandered over to the table and started telling us about how her body keeps jolting every time she prays or meditates and that she thought she was going mad. (I was like well stop praying and meditating then – problem solved. If that doesn’t work there’s always lithium).

She then sat cross-legged on the floor and started jolting right there in front of us.

At the time I leant over to John and said ‘do you have a pen?’

Luckily for the jolting girl, one of my friends, who happened to be there with us taking part in the wasabi eating competition, is a master of Kundalini and fixed her up good so she stopped jolting at least for long enough for us to finish our sashimi before it went off.

You gotta love Ubud birthdays. A truly unique experience.

A friend reminded me of how last year I was sat amidst the growing boxes in our house in SE London on my birthday – in tears. This year was infinitely better.