Rose Cantine

I went to Bali last month and took a lot of photos, which I have posted on Flickr. I love Bali. It’s one of the most atmospheric places on earth. I stayed mostly in Ubud, which is away from the coast. I did spend 2 days in Seminyak which is down the coast from the truly ghastly Kuta. You must never go to Kuta. Seminyak wasn’t terribly beautiful or exciting. The beaches are good for surfing but too rough for swimming. The only good think about Seminyak was the Ku De Ta bar on the beach where you can watch the sunset – great music, good crowd, fabulous (but expensive) drinks and small plates.

The Balinese have a complex culture and religion. They are Hindu and have many rites and festivals that even young people – with all their cell phones, Facebook accounts and Wi-Fi — still observe. The food is truly divine: very spicy and savoury with a lot of vegetables and fruit.

I went to Bali on EVA Air, which goes from SF to Taipei, and then onto Denpasar in Bali. EVA Air has cheap air fares and the service is excellent. They also have Economy Plus that gives you more leg room and doesn’t cost that much more than Economy. Taipei’s international airport has the most amazing duty free shopping I’ve ever seen. Anyway, it’s a pleasant way to travel.

I stayed at Bambu Indah in Ubud. You can read my review on Mapplr.

See my Bali photos on Flickr.

I also visited the impressive Buddhist temple of Borobodur in Jogjakarta which is on the island of Java. It’s a short flight from Bali and well worth it.

Lots of WiFi related news, including how technology and culture have turned cafes into Zombie Cafes, the unpleasantness of Starbucks, the delights of free WiFi in Bali:

A reflection on Starbucks in the US: lack of cafe culture and the role of WiFi

Travels with an iPod Touch: Free WiFi experience in Asia

The 2010 Giro d’Italia will begin with three stages in and around Amsterdam. The 93rd Giro will begin on 8 May 2010 with a prologue through the center of Amsterdam (boy, that should be fun!), followed by 2 stages that start in the city. On May 9, the stage ends in Utrecht which is more or less in the center of the Netherlands; and on May 10, the end of the stage is all the way down in the south, in Middelburg, a beautiful historic city in the province of Zeeland. On May 11 the riders fly to Italy. The Giro will announce the entire parcours in October.

Reverse brain drain: “More skilled immigrants are giving up their American dreams to pursue careers back home, raising concerns that the U.S. may lose its competitive edge in science, technology and other fields. ”What was a trickle has become a flood,” says Duke University’s Vivek Wadhwa, who studies reverse immigration. Wadhwa projects that in the next five years, 100,000 immigrants will go back to India and 100,000 to China, countries that have had rapid economic growth. ”For the first time in American history, we are experiencing the brain drain that other countries experienced,” he says.”

I read somewhere else that for the first time, the percentage of Chinese students studying outside China went to countries other than the US. In the past, the US got most of the students. I wonder if this trend can be found with students from other countries.

I promised to elaborate further on my ten worthwhile summer projects, the no. 1 project being “Meditate”. How do you get started? What is it? And for the more curious, how do you find out more about Buddhism?

I have listed several online resources for meditation instructions and Buddhist teachings. However, there’s no substitute for showing up in person at a meditation center to really learn the proper posture and to ask questions about your practice. It is my hope that once you get started, you will continue to meditate throughout your life, and develop wisdom and lovingkindness.

RESOURCES

Tricycle Magazine: a great resource for those who are new to meditation and Buddhism, and for those who are already practicing the Dharma. Sign up for their Twitter feed (http://twitter.com/tricyclemag)

San Francisco Zen Center: the Zen Center is located in San Francisco at 300 Page Street, San Francisco, CA 94102 in Hayes Valley. They have regular meditation sessions for beginners and more experienced meditators. They also run the Green Gulch Farm Zen Center in Marin County and the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center in Carmel Valley.

Dharmaseed.org: online repository of dharma talks by teachers of Vipassana or Insight practices of Theravada Buddhism. Until now, the teachings had been available only on CD or tapes. You can find them now in MP3 format on this website. They continue to add new recordings of teachings given at various retreats.

My personal favorites are the Satipatthana Sutta teachings given by Joseph Goldstein, cofounder of the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts (where I hope one day to go for a two-week or longer retreat). Listen to his other teachings, too, which are very clear and inspiring.

RETREATS

Tassajara Hot Springs: affiliated with the San Francisco Zen Center, this wonderful retreat is located at the end of a dirt road in the Carmel Valley. It is about 4 hours from San Francisco. There is no electricity, except in the dining hall, kitchens, Japanese bath house and the zendo (the hall where monks and visitors meditate). It is closed in the fall and winter for the Zen practice period. I went to the Tassajara Hot Springs for a 5-day meditation and yoga retreat which turned out to be a deeply spiritual experience. I joined the monks in their 5:40 a.m. and 8:40 p.m. meditation sessions, hiked in the mountains, did yoga twice a day (2 hours per session), ate delicious vegetarian food from their famous kitchen (the Tassajara cookbooks are sold everywhere) and sat in the Japanese style hot springs. I went to bed as soon after the evening meditation. I appreciated how peaceful I became without the demands of email, mobile phones, Twitter and all the other ways we distract ourselves in our daily lives. There is no cellular signal so one is truly cut off from the world. What a luxury!

BOOKS

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The documentary “September Issue” about Anna Wintour and Vogue Magazine is coming out at the end of this month. I can’t wait to see it.

It’s funny how American conservatives get all it all wrong about the British NHS or any other country’s “socialized” medicine. They’ve been calling it a disaster but it works quite well, as Stephen Amidon, an American writer living in Britain, recently wrote in Salon:

“This, I learned, is what the NHS is about — common decency. It is about the shared belief that all the people who live in the United Kingdom constitute a society, and a decent society provides certain necessities for its members. Freedom from hunger is one. Police protection is another. Free healthcare from the cradle to the grave is simply one more item on this list.”

I’ve lived in the Netherlands for over a decade, My health insurance is fairly inexpensive and I have no complaints. The Netherlands does not have a “public” option; all health insurance is carried out by private insurers, but they are subject to very strict rules. They can’t just throw you out, they have to insure people with pre-existing conditions, and they compete with one another. It’s a single payer system.

I recently moved to San Francisco temporarily for business and my monthly health insurance premium here is three times what it was in the Netherlands, the care is no better, the copayments are outrageous, the prescription drugs much more expensive. That means ordinary people are getting ripped off big time and the US government is supporting the rip-off. That people have to go bankrupt because they can’t pay for healthcare is nothing short of barbaric.

Unfortunately the same rip-off artists lobby our federal and state legislators to pass laws that keep this unjust system in place. And ordinary people just let this happen because they’ve got their own nice little healthcare package and they don’t care what happens to others. Until of course, they get laid off. Suddenly the world does not seem so sunny anymore.

I don’t think much will change in the US until the mentality changes from “I’ve got mine, screw you” (which has been the dominant ethos for decades in this country) to “We need to make sure we take care of each other.”