Today we gently awoke in the serene environment of the Ubud Tropical Garden hotel to the sounds of monkeys chattering away, talking about who knows what. As we overlook the rice paddy while breakfast is being served at the pool, we slowly soak in this (to about half of us) new world of Bali. Slowly getting everyone's game on for the day, we decide to start with a walk through the monkey forest. It is, after all, next door. No, really, we're looking at it, on the other side of the narrow rice paddy.

Now the monkey forest is more or less what you'd expect: a forest filled with monkeys. The keepers are quite engaged with the monkeys, obviously having a hand in keeping everyone in line without taking the monkey out of the monkey, so to speak. We have fun watching them live their lives without too much attention to us. You do need to look out for glasses, cameras, purses, even wallets in your pockets. Monkeys will grab those, and you have to pay a local kid a dollar to go after the monkeys and retrieve it for you. I have a strong suspicion that the monkeys and the boys are in on this together.

We saw a few monkeys jump a tourist unexpectedly, which led to screaming, which agitated the monkey. Don't do that. Don't agitate the monkey. They have teeth. They have rabies. Tom and rabies don't mix well. As we say at home: If you can't hang with the big dogs, get off the porch. But a few incidents aside (and some observed tourist stupidities that could have been but weren't the beginning of a bad story), there was some occasional showing of teeth, but nothing worse and these little versions of ourselves went about their business as if we kind of weren't there. Hey, its their home, not ours.

It is most endearing to watch them do things like trying to break open a small coconut (with infinite patience) or using a small rock to scrape large leaves on the stone ground (I think to release the juices, which looks like it's some kind of desert). Or watching them leave one of the several temples as if they just wrapped up prayer, for you were only allowed in to pray. Or watch them checking each other for flees (no shampoo) or feeding their young. You know, life started out for us this way, too. And now we have iPhones.

Afternoon, we did some shopping. Liz bought the coolest pants, which we didn't negotiate too hard, because (1) the shop owner knew we wanted them and (2) she had children there and needed the $3 discount we were pushing for much more than we did even though we realize they do this on purpose to guilt you into not negotiating too hard. At the pool, and feeling like we observed monkeys enough to be experts, we saw a monkey casually walk up the infinity side of the infinity pool, pass within a few feet of us, and keep on walking. He's cool, we're cool, all's cool. Little did we realize that was a reconnaissance mission. A second, larger monkey causally walked the same walk a few minutes later, nonchalantly hung a quick right, without missing a beat jumped on our table, quickly grabbed our bag of chips (the closed one, not the open and nearly empty one), smoothly jumped off and just kept on walking. All in under 2 seconds. Brother Bram chased it, it showed teeth, brother Bram decides losing chips beats rabies, and we have another great experience at the Ubud Tropical Garden. Hey, he could have taken a camera or iPhone.

For the evening we took a bus up the street to Café Lotus where we had a wonderful fish rice table (kind of an Indonesian tapas-like combination of different dishes served family style), which was followed by a traditional Balinese dance party. Or really just a dance, not a dance party. It turned out to be a play, all in Balinese, and we think it had to do with a good spirit dressed in white that needed to overcome some bad spirits dressed in black, and whom was ultimately blessed by an uberspririt (that's the big honcho of spirits, not the spirit you summon on your iPhone). There was no foreigner-friendly intro or extro to the story, so we don't really know. We do know that our waiter was in the band (see pics) and we believe another waitress was singing, so that explains why they really pushed us to finish up our meal close to the show.

Ubud's major streets form a rectangle that you can probably walk in about 40 minutes, guessing here. On it are many tourist shops and places to eat and stay. For some reason, staying next to the monkey forest is the least developed of it all, and for that we are grateful. Some of us had been before, and they say the old, quite, largely undiscovered Ubud is a far cry from today's Ubud. It's still very much a place worth spending a few days while in Bali.