After getting lost a few times I found the first temple, Pura Maospahit & did a walk through. I then signed the guest book & gave my donation. The first 4 pictures are of this temple. The thing I noticed most about the temples are how large the doors are & the wood carving they have done in them. It is really beautiful. The temples are all faded, which makes them less impressive than I would have originally imagined, but they were in overall good shape.

On the way to the second temple I saw the statue from picture #5, it was right next to a store & in a parking lot. It was rather hidden, like it was built at a different time & now it was given the bare necessity of space it needed. Picture #6 was a roundabout which is called Catur Muka Statue, which commemorates the 1906 suicidal stand against the Dutch where the Balinese people burned their own palaces, dressed in their best clothes/jewelry & marched right into the Dutch guns. The 7th picture is from the Puputan Square near the Catur Muka Statue. The rest of the pictures were taken at the Bali Museum & Pura Jagatnata temple next to it, except the last one which was taken walking past the police station.

I realized during all my walking around how big a city Denpasar can be. I also got the old “that temple is closed but I can show you another one” scam, where the person convinces you not to go where you want to & instead takes you to other “better” temples, which end up including stops at shops they work for. But being the wiser to this I just declined. Once inside the second temple (Pura Jagatnata) I received numerous offers for tours & other things that they try to convince you that you need to pay for. After looking through that temple & getting some small cracker like food from a street vendor for 10 cents, I went to the museum which was right next door. It taught me a lot about the different periods on time in Bali & about the culture of Bali. Once again I had sellers following me, even when I moved between buildings in the museum. By this time I had my stern no & walk away down really well, so they would give up much easier. You learn to only say no one time, saying it more than that actually encourages them. I had my MP3 player in my ears for the most part so I could just politely ignore people who were trying to work me over.

After going to all of these cultural places I dedicated the rest of the day to shopping for things I needed. The Australian trip had been hard on some basic things I needed. First off I had lost my camera, but there were more pressing needs like new shoes & a new backpack. The REI backpack I had bought before leaving home had totally broken so that I could only carry it by grabbing the whole bag. Let me say I am very unhappy with the quality of their bags, I was shocked by how easy it broke. I had not even wore it much & had used the handle whenever necessary, but the back straps still broke. My shoes from were originally white when I bought them in New Zealand, but after my time in Australia they had turned red & developed holes so every time it rained I would have wet feet. My first priority was the new shoes. After looking several places I found a pair I wanted which I was able to get on special & that cost about $31. They were Adidas which is the brand I like for running shoes, so that was great, I got them at the mall. After that I looked all over for backpacks. The problem was that I only found small ones, they would have been about half the size of what I had. When I was getting close to home I finally found a shop that had real backpacks, although I ended up paying a lot more than what I wanted. At $55 it was 1/5 the price of the original REI backpack so that was great. It was also about 3/4's the size of the original backpack. That meant that I had extra things I could no longer fit in the pack. It was ok though because I decided I would send all that extra stuff home when I got to Thailand. I had planned on scaling down anyway because I knew I would be wearing the backpack a lot traveling through Asia over the next 4 months. I was not able to buy a camera as I ran out of time.

Denpasar was nice in part because around this mall area it had several American style restaurants which I had not been to in a while. I ate at Pizza Hut for lunch and A&W for supper. Probably not the healthiest thing to do, but it was so nice :) I really enjoyed my time in Denpasar, it gets a bad review from people because it is a big city, but it was my favorite city in Bali. I liked the fact that I was able to get things done I needed & still see cultural sites. I wished I had another day to spend there, I did not even get to all the places I wanted to go, for instance the Taman Budaya Cultural Center. After getting back to the hostel I talked with the owner who was interested about what I had done in the day & if I enjoyed it. I thanked him for the sarong tie he let me borrow to go with my sarong & told him all about the sites I had been to. It was a nice day where I saw a lot & accomplished a lot as well as getting a good walk in.