The wind must’ve been blowing in the direction of our bungalows this morning as the Allah Akbars came in clear and loud at 5:00 a.m. Curses!
We have decided that the charade at Buddha needs to be over. Ryan had given our passports to the manager who had offered to take them to immigration to obtain our extensions for us. Three weeks later, we still hadn’t gotten our passports back and he was professing absentmindedness. Every time we would hear, “oh don’t worry, it’s all taken care of. I just forgot them at home.” I finally got very upset and told them that daily they were costing me money and that I was fed up. And finally yesterday we got our passports back with the extension processed the day before – which means that unbeknownst to us, we were her illegally for10 days – had one of us urgently needed to leave the country, we would have been in one heck of a pickle. Lesson learned!
We had already decided to quit, but for me that absolutely put the last nail in the coffin. I believe that it showed a tremendous amount of disrespect. We have worked here every day for almost a month and every day there has been some sort of problem. The boat engine has not worked, the pool was empty for 3 days, and the level of customer service is shameful. And I think that we’re being taken advantage of. We could possibly change that last part by requiring to be paid the salary of a manager and in turn doing a manager’s job, but I feel like asking for that job would be more painful than dying the agonizing death caused by the bite of the Komodo dragon.
So we’ll take away the lessons learned from this experience. We taught a little, we dived a little and we got paid a little – maybe barely enough to cover the cost of our time here.
We’ve explored Gili quite fully and gotten a good feel for the island so we are now in a position to know where we’d like to work. We’ve narrowed it down to 2 or 3 shops. One already has our application and comes on a recommendation from our friend Amanda from Phi Phi. We’ve made known our desire to accept positions there and are simply waiting to hear if they’ll hire us. They would not need us to start for almost a month though, so we have some time to kill. We will also put in applications at the other two shops for good measure.
Chris and Carolyn arrive in Bali on Monday. Andy arrived in Gili last week sometime. So we three are going to take the speedboat to Ahmed (near Tulamben) on Monday to join Chris and Carolyn up in Tulamben. We will stay in Bali – most likely Tulamben and Ubud until it’s time for us to leave at the end of the month. Ubud has no diving, but is a popular destination for trekking and yoga. And I suppose that it wouldn’t kill us to explore Tulamben as a possible work destination as we sure enjoyed the diving there.
By then we should have some idea of what the situation is with the job we want. If we don’t get this job, I’m not real inclined to come back to Gili except to pick up our stuff. We will also at that point decide whether to leave Indonesia just for one day in order to obtain another visa on arrival which would give us another two months or whether we will go to an embassy to obtain a longer visa. Next possible destinations: Flores or Sulawesi.
Once we quit Buddha Internet will become scarce again for the foreseeable future, but we’ll try to be in touch with updates on Facebook. And I’ll try to update the blog with new cool stuff that we’ll do in the next few weeks.
I can’t wait to see Chris and meet Carolyn. To be reunited with a great friend: what a fantastic birthday present to myself.
Peace xoxoxoxox
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