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The Green School

SarahAlderson

April 18, 2010

Al Gore is visiting later this month. Richard Branson popped by for tea a few weeks ago. The dude from Ben & Jerry’s ran an ice cream-making workshop a month or so ago. So you know, they’re used to visiting dignitaries. We fit in well.

The Green School in Bali – it kind of defies description. Imagine a giant bamboo cathedral/Swiss Family Robinson style edifice. In the midst of jungle. Now picture a giant Marimba ensemble in the middle of the building. Now add in 130 children dancing to the sound. With parents joining in. Imagine if you will girls dancing in the tropical storm, three year olds holding hands with fourteen year olds. Imagine the vibration of feet thundering in time with the rain and wooping normally only heard when Twihards catch a glimpse of Robert Pattinson.

Yeah, there was a moment where I thought maybe the teachers had slipped some LSD into the milk round. Where it felt like a giant evangelical church experience crossed with that bit in Avatar where all the Na’vi are swaying and chanting. And then I was just swept away by it all, kicked off my flip flops and joined in. You can’t fight joy like that.

After the music stopped I walked straight over to the admissions guy and asked him who we made the registration cheque out to. We hadn’t even seen the classrooms, had barely scanned the curriculum, but if I had got to go to a school made entirely of bamboo where I could dance in the rain and learn to grow rice, where Al Gore dropped by to say hello and Mr. Jerry made me ice cream I wouldn’t have spent so much time faking sick notes and forging my mum’s signature on them.

The trigger point

SarahAlderson

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April 15, 2010

‘At what exact point did you decide you weren’t going back to live in the UK?’ Richard asked.

What was the trigger huh?

Well, you know, it wasn’t when I got my fiftieth pile of clean clothes back from the laundry people. It wasn’t when Alula went to play with our neighbour’s family. No, the trigger point came when John and I wondered into a shop in Ubud to look at a pair of Sulawese ancestral statues, carved from stone, that we’d seen in the window. About knee high, one was of a woman clutching her stone 38DDs and the other was a man holding his giant erect penis.

‘I can’t quite see these sitting on our doorstep back home, can you?’ I said to John.

They won’t be sitting on our doorstep here either because they cost 700,000,000 rupiah, which even when you take off five noughts is still a lot.

But it was whilst I was admiring those statues, that I realised I would be the same as that statue, other than the 38DD part, if I tried to live in the UK again. I wouldn’t fit. I’d just sit there, perhaps not naked and perhaps not groping my boobs, but with a stony expression on my face, staring at the rain, wishing I was back in Bali.

The cost of being a woman

SarahAlderson

1 comment

April 11, 2010

The only thing I have to complain about vis a vis Bali is the price of tampax. We’re talking $9US for a box of 8. That’s surely criminal. Some customs man is definitely getting rich off the pain of others.

I wrote down tampax importing business on my list of ‘possible ways to find money to sustain this lifestyle’. At the moment it’s riding quite high on the list. Only because the list is short. The only other thing on the list is me answering the advert for ‘sexy dancers’ to work in Kuta. I think I’m ten years too old and possibly even the wrong sex to make any profit from that.

So….Tampax or the sexy dance?

I need to work on my list.

Politics and laundry

SarahAlderson

2 comments

April 8, 2010

‘It’s interesting reading about the election in the UK isn’t it?’ Richard says.

‘Er. No. Actually. It isn’t.’

When I think of the UK I just think grey. And Cameron. And having to do my own laundry.

‘So do you think you’ll go back?’ he asks

‘You know Rich,’ I say, ‘I just can’t see it. I mean I have a pool here. I haven’t done my own laundry in three months. How could I possibly ever go back?’

A little voice in my head started screaming MONEY MONEY MONEY. I ignored it.

Today I met someone who after 10 years in Bali is going back to Scotland. I looked at her like she was crazy then I looked across her lawn to her swimming pool and to the kitchen where the full time nanny/maid was making her coffee and… again with the crazy thought. But maybe she’s a closet tory and is returning after a self-imposed decade in exile. In which case.. again with the crazy thought.

‘This place rocks,’ I tell Rich.

Every morning I feel like Snow White. A squirrel ran across the living room as I ate breakfast. Two butterflies waltzed over my head. The gecko family (Money and Hoola Hoop – named by Alula) sit sleepily on the ceiling. I’m waiting for them to start singing in harmony about my prince arriving one day. I look at John plugged into the matrix and think ‘yep, still waiting.’

Just kidding.

Eight years ago John, Rich and I were all cramped in a London flat. Now we are all here in Bali. This is totally an upgrade. So no, I can’t see myself living in London permanently again.

But I will tell people it’s because I can’t step foot in a Tory run country. I won’t mention the laundry.

Yoga keeps chasing me

SarahAlderson

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April 5, 2010

We went to the Bali Spirit Festival. There were no psychics or people communing with dead people just a lot of people communing with their inner spirit and doing yoga. Yeah Yeah, get over it, I wanted to yell. But they outnumbered me by about one thousand to one. They were everywhere, shaking, dancing, ashtangaring, saluting the sunning, raw food evangelising and displaying their beautiful bodies like it was a competition for who could be leaner, tighter, do the highest handstand, contort the longest, smile the most serenely, move the most gracefully yada yada. It was a competition I was bound to lose. I’m just jealous. I wish I could get a body like that by saluting Bintang beer and chocolate brownies.

Alula got to pet a snake, bang a drum, hoola hoop, find her inner light and get her face painted like a tiger.

Ubud, Bali is like Brighton crossed with the Hamptons crossed with an ashram. It’s like a lusher, less stressful version of India. But with the added benefit of there being a dvd store that sells every film you could ever want, except Generation Kill, for £1 a pop, and a little man on the street corner who sells the best fake sunglasses on the planet.

Alula has started at nursery – a place so perfect John pronounced it the most gorgeous school he’d ever seen (because prettiness is so much more important than academic standards). It sits amidst rice paddies and all the lessons are in Indonesian and English.

So everything is perfect. Except for the fact John is making me cycle everywhere.

Bali: Is the search over?

SarahAlderson

1 comment

April 5, 2010

The question ‘Can we live here?’ becomes rhetorical in Bali. Like it’s followed by a silent ‘Do bears shit in the woods?’

Can we live here?

What do you reckon?

The neighbours live in a 200 year old teak house. John looks at it. ‘I feel bad. It’s like they’re living in the potting shed.’

I look up at our villa, towering over the Teak potting shed. It looks like the set of a vogue fashion shoot. There is an antique daybed overlooking the pool. It is draped with mosquito nets and strewn with so many pillows and cushions that climbing on it requires crampons. I grin back at John.

‘You’re enjoying it aren’t you?’ he says.

‘Yep,’ I say.

I pull on my fake Fendi’s. ‘So all we need to do now is figure out how to get a permanent visa.’

Dodgy Poos and Cosmic Karma

SarahAlderson

1 comment

April 1, 2010

Aside from the fact we’ve just spent two months in India and aside from the fact I am already familiar with Neasden, John is insisting we visit Little India. Whilst we are in Singapore.

I don’t want to visit Little India. I want to visit air-conditioning and malls and clean sparkling buildings. I want to get reacquainted with all these lovely things. Not with samosas.

‘Dude,’ I say, ‘you dragged me out of air-conditioning to see this? To see what exactly?’

Some skanky streets with skanky backpacker hostels on them? Because that seems to be about it. Even DisneyWorld could have knocked up a better Little India than this.

John asks if I’d rather be somewhere like a mall. He is being sarcastic and I narrow my eyes as if to say ‘no, I’m not that vacuous thank you very much’ but in fact I’m thinking YES. YES a mall. I want to be IN A MALL.

It is hot. I am bothered. I am bothered that John has made me get off an air-conditioned bus and deserted me on a street corner whilst he goes off to rummage for vinyl in an outdoor market. Leaving me with a child who won’t walk, who is now folding herself double screaming ‘I’m tired’ in the middle of the pavement AND who has as she so eloquently puts it ‘dodgy poos’. All in five thousand degrees and 400% humidity.

‘I need a poo,’ Alula announces. She puts on her thinking face. ‘I think I’ve done a dodgy poo.’

We can’t be in an air-conditioned mall with marble floored bathrooms and silk toilet paper. Oh no. We have to be in a replica of a Mumbai street with equivalent bathroom facilities. If we were actually in the real India – the big, grown up India – I would have no qualms about squatting her over the gutter by the side of the road but this is Singapore and you’d probably get hung, drawn and quartered for that here so instead I grab her hand and march her across the road (jaywalking – lesser FINE – only $500SGD) and into a backpacker hostel. The staff wave us towards the back. I nudge open the door to the bathroom and Alula and I flinch in horror from the scene. And then I flinch in horror at the mess she’s already made – never mind the state of the toilet…I manage to hoist her somehow over the bowl. She poos Armageddon style and then I look for toilet paper. There is none. Of course there is none. This is Little India.

Anyway, Alula leaves the place commando style. I have attempted to use the hose provided to get the worst of the dodgy poos off but it’s not been that successful because the water was cold and she almost hit the ceiling when I fired it at her.

‘I’m tired,’ she says as we start walking up the street.

John does his fatherly duty and picks her up and deposits her on his shoulders. I open my mouth to warn him about the danger that might represent then I shut my mouth again.

That’s called Karma baby.

The lights go out on the shop of top.

SarahAlderson

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March 30, 2010

Somewhere over the Bay of Bengal, whilst John and I were busy decanting our cabernet sauvignon into plastic glasses and grinning manically at each other (it was the first red wine we’d had in two months. The fact it was 10am seemed inconsequential – as I argued to John – somewhere else in the world it was 10pm and at 36,000 feet wine o’clock concepts are literally out the window) but somewhere over the Bay of Bengal Qantas diverted our flight to the planet Natalie Portman lived on in Star Wars.

It’s immaculate and shiny and perfect here. Like a sci-fi version of the Truman Show. I half-expect our taxi to the hotel to be a space pod with a robot at the wheel. Everything is pristine and clean like the world has been rinsed in floral scented bleach and then buffed with a chamois. Even the radio playing in the taxi is sanitised. Phil Collins croons to us softly as I sink back into the cool leather seats with a sublime smile.

‘Is this still earth?’ I ask John.

‘No. It’s Singapore.’

Just eight hours before this we were in a creaking death trap of a taxi spluttering and honking and careering our way through the streets of Mumbai to the airport, passing slum after slum and beggar after beggar along the way.

There are no slums in Singapore. There are no beggars either. Considering they fine you for jaywalking here imagine what they’d do to you for asking for small change. It takes a while to realise what else is different here. Then I realise it’s the noise of a billion tuk tuk drivers honking in unison. The cars swish here. They stop in a neat line within their lanes. And they are silent. The traffic light beeps for the pedestrians. There is actually a Green Man. I stare at him like a long lost friend unsure of what to say or how to treat him. The cars rest patiently, indolently, before cruising smoothly off into the night. There is a pavement on which to walk. A smooth, shit-free pavement. How is this real? How does Singapore exist in the same world as a place like Mumbai? It’s like living in The Truman Show. I’m not sure this can be real.

Our bed is made up of white sheets. White feels like a brand new colour. Our bed seems to sparkle. It makes me blink just to stare at it. And it makes me cry to lie on it. It’s a mattress. Not a hardboard plank. There’s a duvet. It’s soft and warm – like lying in a cradle of feathers.

We pass by Raffles hospital.

‘I want to get ill just so I can go in there,’ I tell John. It looks like the Ritz through beer goggles.

I enter a coffee shop and three people rush smiling towards me as though I’m the Queen come for tea. I sit. The waitress brings me some iced water without me asking and then she compliments me on my necklace. In the USA when customer service people are this nice I want to slap them (I say the US because in the UK this would never even happen. It’s not even capable of being a hypothetical) but here, here I want to take this girl home and make her my best friend.

But you want to know the best bit? The very best bit about Singapore?

There’s a Topshop. That holiest of places. It gives me chills just to enter it. But that could be the air-con. I’m not used to air-con. I want to fall to the floor and sob in relief and gratitude and happiness at the sight of all these pretty clothes and shoes. Which are definitely not, in any way whatsoever too young for me.

And then I check out the price tags and realise that even if it didn’t come from Dharavi, there is no way I can justify spending £40 on a bikini. Not anymore. I turn my back on the bright enticing lights of the shop of top and walk away.

Maybe something happened to me over the Bay of Bengal too.

There is however a Topshop in Bali.

So we’ll see how long this commitment to virtue lasts.

A slum – but not as you know it

SarahAlderson

4 comments

March 30, 2010

Dharavi is the largest slum in Asia. It is 2sq kilometres and home to 1 million people. Yes you heard me, ONE million people. Not a one of them wearing converse, leggings and a dress from Gap. So my attempt to blend in is not working. People are staring at us like we’re another life form come to probe their planet.

We are on a walking tour of Dharavi. I have issues. Not least with the walking part. But mainly my issues are with the part where we pay money to go stare at poor people. It feels like an update on the Victorian practice of going to stare at the crazy people locked up in the Bedlam all in the name of entertainment. But I am doing it anyway because there’s no Curzon in Mumbai and I was bored. Just kidding. I am here because the money from the tours goes straight back into the local community via a community centre and a kindergarten. And because John said I had to.

The guide zig zags us through alleys so narrow only the faeces can run through it freely. The rubbish dump burns day and night. A toxic plastic smoke sears our lungs. Children use the place as their playground.

Yet for all its dirt and crammedness (it’s the most densely populated place on earth), Dharavi is a hive of activity and micro-industry and that’s what the tour is at pains to point out. This is not a slum as we would imagine one to be. Dharavi has an economy of around $800 million a year. Though the workers in the sweatshops earn about £1.20 for a twelve hour day. And these are literally sweat shops. Now I get why they’re called that. We stopped in a workshop where men were feeding ground up aluminium cans into hot lava, producing at the end of it all ingots of aluminium which get sold back to the canning factories so our coca cola can be reborn.

Over 250,000 Dharavi inhabitants are employed on recycling initiatives – from coke cans to paint tins and cooking oil vats.

We wandered through the Gujarati part of town. The part that looks like the garden section at homebase for all the thousands of flower pots. The guide asked if we had any questions. Yeah, I wanted to ask, is it hot enough?

We finished up with a visit to the community centre. There were lots of Dharavi inhabitants there learning English. We handed over our rupee notes. The equivalent of four days work to one of the people of Dharavi, then we took a taxi back to our fan cooled, maid-serviced, security-guarded, fully utilitied up flat and ate the lunch the cook had prepared and showered in clean water and lay down on freshly laundered sheets for a nap.

India makes me feel a lot of things – hot, tired, elated, frustrated, delighted, angry, stressed and relaxed. But mostly it makes me feel enormously lucky. And in equal measure…guilty.

What not to wear

SarahAlderson

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March 27, 2010

‘I can’t go. I have NOTHING to wear,’ I wail to John whilst rooting through my rucksack like a squirrel after winter nuts.

John can’t believe I’m worrying about fashion at a time like this.

‘I’m serious. I have NOTHING to wear. I can’t go.’ I repeat. It’s a calculated hysteria. I’m hoping this excuse will put paid to the plan to tour Dharavi tomorrow. Dharavi is not, as you might think from this little exchange, a palace, a temple or a Bollywood star’s mansion, it’s the largest slum in Asia.

That numnut from Grand Designs made possibly the worst documentary ever all about it and I wanted to smack him around the head with his unread copy of Shantaram. Clearly the man had not done his homework prior. Unlike John, who hasn’t read Shantaram but who has read the Reality Tours website.

‘It said to dress modestly,’ John reminds me.

I stare at John and don’t say anything. It’s not like I dress like a ho but my bag is packed mainly with bikinis and a very cute shorts jumpsuit I got from Reiss. Not that appropriate for the open sewers of Dharavi.

‘What’s the longest thing you brought with you?’ he says sighing.

I’m wearing it. It’s a gap dress that falls to the knee. ‘It’s fairly modest.’ I say tugging at it (or it would be if I hadn’t somehow lost all my bras). It’s a lie. I do have something longer but it’s so see-through it may as well be the Emperor’s new clothes.

But I can’t accessorise this dress that I am wearing with my converse. I just can’t. It would be wrong. John reminds me it’s either accessorizing with the converse or having an excrement pedicure. I’m about to throw myself on the bed and tantrum when I remember there is a no photo policy on the tour. Which means that there would be no photographic evidence of the fashion crime I would be committing.

John is just relieved Alula isn’t coming too. As if one fashion obsessed female in the house isn’t enough. Yesterday she insisted on wearing her new blue flower dress underneath her pink skirt, underneath her purple butterfly dress. With the tutu on the top and then 3, yes you heard me right, 3 hats stacked like pancakes on her head. Imagine the fuss she would make about what to wear to Dharavi.