This is true for the restaurants particularly, where the local cuisine is usually a combination of traditions, offering a splendid blend of spices that can’t be matched by any other culinary tradition around.  For luxury hotels, Indonesia offers sumptuous lodgings for travelers, with a welcome that is spectacularly warm, and small and enormously charming details that don’t make themselves known at first glance.  Indonesia is a fantastic place to get in touch with the rhythm of the world.  I Wayan Sadra is an excellent composer to listen to as you start to prepare for your journey here.

It’s also fantastic music to listen to while you’re here, and it’s an amazing thing to see him perform live, if you get the opportunity.  Born in Denpasar, Bali, in 1953, Sadra is one of the most interesting and innovative composers working in Indonesia today.  He is on the faculty of music at the University in Central Java, having moved from Bali to Jakarta to study traditional music, painting, and composition.  His works are a magnificent blend of traditional types of music from here, as well as some European techniques, to make a sound that is entirely contemporary, and  very local, and always on the verge of something new, found through mining the rhythms on the bones of the past.

I Wayan Sadra, Composing Indonesia is a post from: VidMama

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The official reason given involves a string of misinformation. Like, ‘The state owned importer forgot to order anything’, or ‘The customs department is in the state of reorganization’, or ‘This is all connected with a smuggling ring where the smugglers are using counterfeit duty seals’. One has to smile because this kind of reasoning or rather an attempt of deception or, perhaps, a deflection repeated time and time again in Indonesia when something goes wrong is actually amusing. But, if one looks long at the snippets between the lines, one will find the real reason. The Indonesian Military (TNI) control the alcohol business in Bali. The TNI operate mostly clandestine businesses in Indonesia, such as alcohol and security for major foreign corporations. Now, I ask you, who even thought of making the military in charge of Alcohol distribution? So, now in Bali, there is now an initiative from the civilian administration headed by President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono to separate the TNI from running any business at all.

Recently, the International community have been encouraging the civilian administration AKA the Indonesian Government to get their armed forces out of politics and business. Part of this process was to have the TNI publicly reveal all of the official companies that they are in charge of. The TNI reported they only control 6 businesses and most of those are owned along with the civilian administration / government. They further stated that they do not keep any money in the businesses they operate and use the state assets to keep the businesses running. I’ll drink to that.

Libations Bali is a post from: VidMama

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