One thing the Balinese do better than any other place on earth is celebrate. There is a celebration for anything and everything here, from a day of silence to a post Ramadan festival. It entails the best part of a day and is usually religious in some way. Whether Hindu, Muslim, or just a Balinese thing, they happen a lot.
Our neighbour recently knocked on our door one morning to tell us his wife had just had a baby and so there would be a celebration. The words “sorry for any noise” by the neighbour were followed by about 12 hours of intense (and low quality) karaoke and a lot of Arak.
I wonder what the mother made of this and whether she was there or still in the hospital. I didn’t hear any women on the karaoke microphone, but I imagine she wouldn’t have felt up to belting out any classic rock anthems even if she was. Maybe she was in labour and that’s when the father kicked off with the party; perhaps he was so excited that he couldn’t wait for the baby to arrive before celebrating. Hard to tell, but we can be certain a celebration occurred.
In the UK, we are rather more reserved when it comes to celebrating the arrival of new life and simply ‘wet the baby’s head’ to mark a birth. This entails a stiff drink, possibly a cigar, along with some manly slaps on the back combined with the uttering of pleasantries such as ‘well done, old chap’.
In Bali, there are a total of around 50 official festivals and/or celebrations each year plus the extra ceremonies (e.g., for a birth, a death, the opening of a new building, or a general blessing).
When it comes to my kids’ nursery, it can often be frustrating as there are always several days of no school in each term for these days. We have more than once taken our kids back to nursery on a Monday after the regular school holidays only to find it was a one-day week due to a celebration. This can be quite tough since we are certainly not going to be celebrating more full-time childcare when we need to get on with work, etc.
What impresses me most about celebrations is that they can sometimes be held at a moment’s notice, for example, when our nursery decided to celebrate the 30th Anniversary of its opening one Monday afternoon. The celebration would be 2 days later, on the Wednesday. Parents were informed via WhatsApp, cue frantic scramble to rearrange diaries and cover unexpected childcare. Quite astonishing really but also perfectly normal in Bali, and we ‘suck it up’ with limited complaining. I feel this may have got to me more than I thought because as I write this I’m hitting the keys on my computer much harder than normal…!
The long and short of it is that nothing gets in the way of the Balinese and a day off, and you can’t open a packet of crisps without the potential need for a blessing ceremony. This is reflective, I believe, of a deep-rooted cultural instinct, and now I’ve got used to it, I genuinely do like and respect it. After all, nothing is more important than spending time with friends and family to convene over a shared sense of purpose. It creates ease, peace, and a sense of community. Maybe the sense of ‘togetherness’ these celebrations evoke is the reason people don’t ever seem to get angry and smile so frequently.
So let’s embrace celebration and even try to find more things worth celebrating – impromptu is fine, you’re in Bali!
Tune in here for next week’s ‘An Englishman in Bali’ series.
