Day 257: Green School and TitiBatu with Josh, Jess and Noah from NYC
We woke up and decided to try to move hotels. This hotel is a well-located, budget spot in the heart of downtown Ubud. Only problem is it’s a little gritty and ant-y. We’ve done plenty of budget stays this year — and plenty of grimey ones! — but we decided we didn’t want to spend another five nights in this one. In a land of amazing hotels and cool places to stay, we decided we’d find a new spot in Ubud.
And by ‘we’ I mean our travel agent! Huge benefit of working with agents on this trip — our attention isn’t 100% dedicated to logistics. While he kindly helped us out, we did school and ate a tasty lunch at Cafe Wayan — shoeless and seated at a traditional low table.
We’re still holding to our “grownups order the food” rule.
Speaking of travel agents, our Indonesia/Australia agent hooked us up with a local “guy” to drive us around or take us where we want while we’re in Ubud. Not a luxury tour van but just a trusted local named Nyoman with a Toyota.
After lunch, Nyoman drove us the 45 minutes south toward the Green School, a radical newish school built entirely of sweeping, sustainable bamboo structures in the middle of the jungle. The school, according to the NYT, “has become a sort of bamboo beacon, a pilgrimage site for progressive educators, a stop for TED-circuit global luminaries from Ban Ki-moon to Jane Goodall.”
Ha! And the Sullivans!
Our reason for visiting was to see Noah Maurer, Willa’s former classmate from Blue School in New York. He and his parents picked up and left NYC this summer to try life in Bali at Green School for at least a year.
And we thought we’d uprooted everything…
(And yes, we get the humor in the Blue School and Green School. There are indeed many similarities…)
Noah’s dad Josh is an actor and mom Jess is a writer, so there’s flexibility there, though it sounds like still kind of logistically tough with shooting schedules, etc. They’re making it work for now.
Josh has been really involved with learning how to design and build with bamboo, so he treated us to a thorough tour of the full compound, which included:
- Compost toilets
- Soaring thatched bamboo palaces for indoor-outdoor classrooms from K to 12.
- “Heart of School” — the main gathering area with the cafeteria and meeting rooms.
- Irrigation
- Gardens
- Bridges
- A copper-roofed music room
- A repurposed-car-windshield-roofed green house
- A cafe
- Repurposed tires playground with zip line
- Etc…
These pics don’t really do it justice:
As the NYT writer put it, “I surveyed with envy the kids merrily clambering down jungle paths, the river gurgling in the background and the colorful shrines bedecking the hillsides, thinking grimly of my daughter encased in her sealed-window institutional public school building, shunted to the school gym to watch movies on days with a little bit of bad weather.”
Our school back home is about as close to this school as a US school is going to get — so at least I didn’t feel bad like this writer…but yeah, it was hard not to make such comparisons…
It was fun for Willa to be reunited with sweet Noah.
We all drove from there over to Titi Batu, a pool and club facility.
These are apparently really common in Bali: Places where you can buy a daypass to hang out at a pool, eat lunch, let the kids run around a playground and skate park, do yoga or exercise classes, workout in the gym, get a massage…
Kind of like a Soho House but fully accessible to anyone who buys a daypass. It’s super Australian – beachy, breezy.
Okay!
The kids swam, jumped off a concrete outcrop/ledge, rented skateboards and scooters for the park and ate dinner together.
Parents chit chatted and ordered food for an early dinner.
Josh and Jess told us how the house they’re living in at the beach is the 14th place they looked at before settling down since arriving 2 months ago. Teddy pointed out later that in their short time here they’ve had three experiences that, each on their own would have been the worst thing to happen to us all year — or in a decade…
- Their first house in the jungle had a full-on jungle critter infestation, with hand-sized pregnant Wolf spiders giving birth to thousands of babies, giant hissing scorpions on the attack, etc.
- Noah got swept out in a rip current in a matter of seconds — went from playing in waist-high water to being pulled swiftly out to sea. Josh ran to the water and had to do the whole swimming sideways thing to save him while Jess watched.
- Josh ate bad seafood and got a hideous parasite that crippled him for a week plus. Thought he was going to die.
Jesus. Without this kind of drama, is there really a book in the making for the Sullivans??
They also mentioned that even their own personal experience, the island has changed so much in the last five years. They came here in 2015 to see the school, and the beach where they currently live was basically empty. Today it’s packed with chain stores and big beach nightclubs.
Josh thinks Instagram has had a massive impact on the place, which we are quickly seeing for ourselves — everyone’s posing, everywhere we go.
As the night drew to an end, Josh made a “totally sincere offer” for us to stay in their house at the beach for the weekend since they’ll be away.
The timing was good, turns out. And we’re in the business of accepting all invitations and recommendations this year. So we took them up on it! We’ll head there in the morning for two nights…
In the meantime, it was time to wrap the evening. We knew this would be hard for Willa, as she 1) is clearly missing friends and 2) has always adored Noah (I mean, wouldn’t you if you were she??).
We genuinely felt sorry for her. Hers wasn’t just a whiney “I don’t want to say goodbye to Noah,” it was a profound sadness at having to bring such a fun day to an end and give up yet another pal out here on the road. James too was disappointed. It was hard to watch, honestly.
There were tears as we drove away. Poor girl.
MISC
Josh told us no buildings on Bali are allowed to be taller than a coconut tree.
Teddy made a spot-on observation about halfway through the day: “I keep wondering why I feel so disoriented in Bali. I realize that it’s because this is the first time we’ve seen so many white people since we left Europe.”
It’s true — and I’m still trying to figure this place out. Is it cool? Is it beautiful? Is it authentic? Is it overrated? Is it…“ruined?” We’ve gotten snippets of all of the above, but not enough to draw any conclusions yet. We’ve got a lot of time on this island in a number of different spots to figure it out. But I wouldn’t say it’s been some transcendent Elizabeth Gilbert experience for us (yet?).
