There’s a long list of artistic and cultural places we want to go and things we want to do here in Ubud: art classes, dance performances, museums, and more. The Private Eye has, since her making a large parade-style puppet last year, been very interested in puppetry. Shadow puppetry is an art form here, called Wayang Kulit, so we made Sunday night’s venture to go to a show. There was a simple sheet, with a torch behind it. You could see where, over decades, the torch has sooted the ceiling black and eroded the plaster a bit. The puppetmaster was 80 years old, and had several assistants. The show we saw told the story of the Sacrifice of Bima, where Bima offers himself as a sacrifice to a demon to appease it and save a kingdom, then defeats it in battle.

We met an expat art teacher (from British Columbia, now teaches in Turkey) who comes to Bali every few years to learn some new arts. We chatted for a bit and might meet up tomorrow for a walk around the city.

On Monday, 2/4, we woke up and made our way to the small private library that is seemingly becoming our base of operations. We’d scheduled a silversmithing class for 10AM: 3 hours cost R200k/person ($25), including up to 3 grams of silver, you pay for the extra silver if you want to use more. After a bit of discussion, we decided to make rings, similar in shape (both ringed bands with designs within), but different in style. Our teacher, Anna, has been a silversmith all her life, and her entire family are silversmiths.

First, you decide how big a ring, and cut a piece of silver (92.5% silver, 7.5% copper) plate of the right width and length. You then solder (with silver solder) the two ends together, and shape it into a circle. You then add the wires that form the rings on the edges of the band, and solder them on. At this point, you have two simple silver rings, and you need to add the decoration.

I chose a design that I’d never seen before, but in my typical style is much easier to do than it looks. You take a thin piece of silver plate and crinkle it up, heat it, and crinkle it up again. You cut the plate to the right length and width to fit between the rings, and solder it in.

The Private Eye chose a beaded design with curls. To do this design, you take thin silver wire and bend it into the desired curls, then glue them to the face of the ring. Using tiny bits of glue, you then affix tiny silver beads; she also affixed some small disks.

You then dab some solder around the pieces and heat the ring, replacing the glue with metal. To heat the rings, Anna had a foot pumped propane torch. Very simple, but it works!

After the rings have cooled, you polish them, inside and out. We used an oxidizing solution to darken recessions in our designs, then polished again to make the raised regions shiny. Two hours later, we had silver rings made by our own hands.

We are trying to keep to a R500k/day ($60) budget, which would be easy except for all of these artistic ventures. To attend a Kecak dance tonight we’re going to cheat and borrow from tomorrow’s finances. Food isn’t too hard — you can get a tasty meal of noodls or fried rice with vegetables for R15k. Of course there are also super-fancy places here with R60k desserts, but we’d rather spend our money on art and save for diving and other adventures.

We haven’t quite figured out our schedule yet. It turns out that Life is Too Short (whom we met in Luang Prabang) has been distracted by Myanmar, so might not make it to Bali until the 16th. We definitely have a few more days in Ubud, but don’t know how many. I don’t know if we are going to try Kuta (the Bali foreigner party city) at all, or just avoid its western stuff and skip directly to Gili Air.

(this post is a bit brief and choppy because I’m trying to finish it quickly before The Private Eye returns from the spa!)

— The Professor