ting-clik! my new favorite word (by Amy fri 1/25/07)

Craig and I are standing in the singapore airport, with clouds of free perfume around me using the free web service. We are enroute from bali, where we have spent 6 days.

For the first time ever in Bali, I just unplugged, no news no email and what a great time to do it, and now we are reading the Asian versions of the wall street journal, etc, very cool to get the asian economic perspective on the stock markets and their meanings. But I am thinking about our recent week and what I think were the highlights. At this moment I'm pretty sure it was finding our ting-clik.

Ting-clik. This is what balinese call the keyboard part of a gamelan, the xylophone. We have acquired a bambu ting-clik. It has a beautiful tone and it is made of lovely carved wood with dragons or lions, painted in red and gold.

In a week in Bali, we have seen much and traveled a bit, but it is all a bit of a blur since, due to our friends slightly late arrival and the holidays of Gamelan, and pre Gamelan, and post gamelan, and being a bit in the company of 3 boys aged 6 to 11, things were considerably slower and more relaxed than other trips. I would say the highlight for me was traveling again with I Made Mustika also known as Made Kepeler, a really nice man, great laugh, he and Craig really enjoy each other and he is really fun to have as a traveler and has great advice.

One day as he was driving us up to a coastal village on the north coast, Amed, he stopped with us just outside of Ubud, at a gamelan factory, a sort of large open warehouse-like building where a forge was cooling down in one corner, and someone was scooping up the fresh ashes, meanwhile seated around on the floor were a number of balinese men using special chisels and files to make shiny bronze gamelan keys and gongs. The metal keys are forged flat, but they end up with a beveled edge, and I never realized this is done through just person-power, nothing electric or automated about it, just a balinese man sitting on his haunches pushing a filing tool carefully along the bronze key's edge, with the metal gleaming as it is filed and 'tuned''.

As the bronze key makers worked, others were nearby, carving and painting the wooden bases for the ting cliks and the gongs and the other instruments. They were working on one set at this time which has a beautiful motif of a bonsai-like tree, in gold on red. Each piece of the gamelan set had this worked onto the front of it. Just before we arrived, a group of gamelan players showed up, checking out the instruments, maybe these were being made for them; they wandered around the factory and then into the front room, where a few completed gongs were set up, and pounded each gong with their fists or the hammers, and listened to the tones and made editorial comments. As this was happening, we were also checking out the instruments and realized they had what we sought, a really nicely tuned and beautifully made ting-clik, of bamboo, not one of their set which was metal-based.

Another highlight I remember about this trip was driving through a 'highland'area, where the local villagers build 'sangga', these are the individual family temples where they would store sacred objects. They are build of carved wood and have doors in the front; they are roofed with the same black fiber that roofs the small temple lanterns we have bought in the past for our garden. But they are really big! These black roofs are in levels, one or 3 or 5, because they are symbols of Mt Meru, the hindu holy mountain; and like the mountain, they are BIG. A sangga with a base that is about 18 inches square, has a large black roof about four feet wide and three tall. They make them up in the woodlands, so you drive along country roads about a lane and a half wide and here and there someone's family compound is full of newly made Sangghas, in fresh wood or stained wood or, the 'best''according to Made, Red and gold.