March Fourth, Hi All!

Hi all! Today was our sixth day in Bali, which started off with a healthy breakfast consisting of omelets and croissants. At nine AM our first class began. We went over the introduction part of our composition, which we have been practicing for the past couple of days. After getting super tired from practicing the same thing over and over again, we went over to practicing a new part; the body of the composition. We all got to learn new patterns on the instrument we've been playing. After playing our new part several times Wayan, our teacher, taught us a monkey chant. There have to be a lot of people in a monkey chant in order to sound as amazing as it does and in order to make it work well. There's always a "monkey leader" who leads off all the other chanter. There are usually two parts to the chant. A singing part, representing one of the gods, and a rhythmic part, which consists of the on and off beat repeating of a word. The word that gets repeated sounds something like "kecak-kecak". The singing part are repeated words as well, sounding something like, "sir yangar yangur yanger yang" and are sung in different melodies depending on which god is represented. Learning about the chants and doing it ourself was so much fun and was definitely an exciting experience. After classes, a couple of us went to the supermarket to grab some snacks such as chips and cookies, others went to dip in the pool or ocean, and others played a round of pool. It's almost seven PM now and we're all waiting for dinner to get served so we can all jump into bed and get some good sleep for tomorrow's class. All in all, today was a really good day with a lot of experimenting and experiencing a new part of Balinese culture and tradition. 

Kati