So happy to celebrate valentines day in Bali this year. It is much easier to plan something romantic in a tropical paradise then in the February cold we are accustomed to.
We decided to bike to Ubud, a 40 minute trip which took us 2 hours due to all the beautiful things to see and our generally poor sense of direction. We stopped on the way for a delicious lunch but once in Ubud we were overwhelmed by choice. Ultimately we decided to visit a beautiful art museum, cool off with some milk tea in the museum cafe and trek through the infamous monkey forest.
The museum Agung Rai Museum of Art or more simply ARMA was surounded by beautiful gardens and housed tapestries, contemporary works and a number of paintings from Ubud in the1920s and 1930s which were my favorite by far. They often reminded me of comics (futurama in particular) or painting by gauguin and were astoundingly intricate.
Prior to 1920s Balinese paintings almost always depicted Hindu-Javanese epics like the Ramayana and Mahabharata. The two-dimensional drawings are traditionally drawn on cloth with natural dyes, lots of blacks and blues. In the 1920s, with the arrival of many western artists, Bali became an artist enclave (as Tahiti was for Paul Gauguin) for avant-garde artists such as Walter Spies.
After the art museum we took a quick walk through the Monkey Forests to hang out with some monkeys! The place is magical but seeing all the moma monkeys with their clinging little babies made me miss Theo.
So we finished valentines day at home where I cooked ginger noodles and chicken taccos with thai chillies for my two valentines :)
