We are on our first staycation:
informal
: a vacation spent in one’s home country rather than abroad, or one spent at home and involving day trips to local attractions.
- Learn how to say “hello, good bye, please, thank you, I don’t speak ______” in the native tongue.
- Find a safe clean place to stay in a residential neighborhood.
- Research and download the applications that “the people” are using (google it).
- Grab some groceries.
- Smile, be approachable, and engage with people and make some connections.
- Talk to the host if using a homestay and talk to taxi drivers – they usually have the best info.
This trip we are traveling through Thailand and the island of Bali in Indonesia. We used to try to see a lot of towns in 3 day stints but we could never really get a handle of the culture or an understanding of the people. Now we try to stay in a single place for at least 2 weeks….if we can. Ideally, we will find a base and stay there for a couple of months and do some archaeological type of digging into the culture.
Getting Around
We are in Bali for a few weeks. After googling which apps to download we found that the locals use an app called Grab (and Uber) to get reasonable taksi (taxi) rides. We caught a grab to Mal Bali Galeria and it cost us 22K ($1.75 USD) from our residence. When we were ready to come home we wanted to see how much it would cost if we didn’t use the app.
We asked how much a cab would cost and the mall concierge quoted us 250K IDR ($20 USD). An average tourist would think that was okay but your American dollar should do a lot more for you. Needless to say, we used our Grab app and paid the 22K to get home.
Dirty Laundry
We have been on the road for almost 3 weeks. None of the places we have stayed had a washing machine so we washed our clothes by hand until we could locate a laundry mat. There are no traces of them on the main strips or by the malls or by popular restaurants; though, we saw plenty in residential neighborhoods. To compare, we inquired about the laundry service at a nearby hotel – their price list was a freaking joke. One laundered sweater = $10k, while the neighborhood laundry mat charged the same amount per kilogram of clothes which is very reasonable. AND they came pressed and folded, see image 🙂
We’re just trying to stretch our dollar, and live smarter everyday.
