Your guide to the Bali Expat Community

Welcome to the latest issue of Tropical Living. As usual, you will find details of lots of amazingly beautiful properties, great articles, interviews, and art features. But since you (presumably) want to live here, or maybe you’ve already taken the plunge, here is your handy cutout- and-keep guide to the Bali expat community. So come on in, choose your social category, and get into the great Bali lifestyle.............

Desperate Housewives
Most week-day mornings, you will find a dozen or so Kijangs parked outside La Luciola with cowed drivers nervously waiting for their employers to finish their Eggs Benedicts, Frappucinos and perhaps just the one Mimosa. Enter the restaurant, and you will see enough coiffed peroxide to bleach the Congo, Jimmy Choo’s for an entire discount store and a cloud of smoke emitting from a hundred Marlboro Lights. Sit as inconspicuously a you dare close by, and hear Fulham accents and Melbourne twangs discussing their husband’s many shortcomings (and short comings), the drunkenness and loutish behaviour of said husband’s bosses, the unreliability of the domestic staff and of course the utter bitchiness, dire financial straits, sagging bosoms and general disgracefulness of whomever among them couldn’t make breakfast on that particular day. The Desperate Housewives are busy, busy, busy. School run in the morning, a quick three-hour breakfast with the girls, manicure, pedicure, massage, yoga lessons, tennis lessons, pick up little Tarquin, drop him off with the maids, shopping, fittings, more shopping, afternoon drinks, dinner with the Johnson’s and the next day it starts all over again. Simply exhausting, darling! If you are lucky enough to be ordained into this most exclusive of Bali clubs, you’d better make sure your hubby is prepared to increase the limit on your Amex card.

The TTB (Trinket Trade Brigade)
Bali wasn’t started by you and me; it was started by a near-mythical Italian furniture exporter by the name of Giancarlo. Giancarlo and his friends arrived here in the 70’s, and they ain’t going nowhere, mainly because they can’t afford to. Giancarlo and his friends, whom are collectively known as the TTB, are all extremely tanned, very thin, covered in interesting tattoos and still dress like the Mamas and the Papas circa 1967. They survive ( just) by sending one container a year of dubious furniture, custom jewelry or batik to a cousin’s shop in Milan or Lyon. They congregate at Bali Deli, where they will buy one small bag of organic lettuce for fifteen dollars, 22 grams of Parma ham and nothing else, and at KuDeTa, where they nurse their cocktails for extraordinary lengths of time. Legend has it that one prominent T TB member, Jean-Pierre Grandnose, managed to convincingly sip a Long Island Ice Tea for seven hours last August.

The Committee Members
There are many organizations in Bali, with various nominal activities and purposes apart from having lunch and taking down memoranda and giving each other certificates, pins and rather camp-looking fake gold chains, but almost all of them have the same sort of members, namely the sort of fellow who would back home volunteer to be a Returning Officer at a general election and have his own engraved pewter behind the bar at his local pub. The Committee Members and their brethren have joined in order to ‘put something back to the community’ but instead of actually sending a cheque to Oxfam they spend most of their time bickering about who should be on the sub-committee for Membership Rule Compliance and who should be in charge of the tombola at the next Christmas party. In all fairness, some of them actually do an awful lot of good things, but why they feel it necessary to eat rubber chicken in a hotel conference room on alternate Wednesdays and start meetings with the words ‘Hear ye, hear ye’ beats me. They are very fond of the Arena Sports Cafe, Mama’s in Kuta and Gracy Kelly’s Irish Pub.

The Undesirables
Timeshare salesmen, ageing former strippers, unemployed building contractors who once was the fifth assistant sewage consultant when the Four Seasons was built twenty years ago and haven’t worked since, druggies, drunks, left-behinds, 60-year old Australian ‘property developers’ driving mopeds to their rented bedsits on Poppy’s Lane, ex-cons with dodgy passports who cannot leave but can’t afford to stay, slightly ill Dutch retirees, and so forth, are all in plentiful supply.

The Very Rich
There are more very rich people in Bali than you would think, but you never see them. They have very large estates in Canggu, Ubud and the Bukit, but they would never lower themselves to actually slum it with you and me in Cafe Warisan. Instead, they have Dou-Dou coming in to cook for them. Their guests are helicoptered in from the airport so they don’t have to spend any time in traffic, and every year or so they throw a very large party to which you and I may or may not be invited as seat fillers. These are the most coveted, almost mythical, invitations, and they are spoken of in hushed, reverential tones. I’ve only been invited to one in the three years I’ve lived in Bali and I felt a bit like a farmer introduced to the Prince of Wales at a County Fair. Way out of my league. When Tom Parker Bowles was in Bali a while back, I know people who actually peed themselves with anticipation and desperate hopes of an invite to the very discreet dinner parties along the Sayan River being held in his honour.

The Boring Old Farts (BOFS)
This is the social category to which I belong, and obviously the one I would recommend you join, too. Our idea of a wild night out is dinner at Warisan once a fortnight, where we will have two gin tonics before dinner if we feel extra naughty, fois gras and a filet steak and three glasses of good wine, and then a night cap at Hu’u Bar where, occasionally, we will dance awkwardly and badly for no more than ten minutes, and then in bed by 11:30, midnight tops. The BOFS are of the firm opinion that nothing is more ludicrous than the sight of a 48-year old stockbroker with a paunch, wearing a sequined shirt, making an arse of himself at Paparazzi at 3 AM. No, our pleasures are more genteel; a good bottle of Burgundy and some runny brie on a friend’s veranda watching the sun set over Jimbaran Bay, a dive trip to Padang Bai where you have grilled Mah Mahi and cold Bintang on the beach and go to bed at 9PM so you can catch the diveboat at 7 AM the following day. The occasional round of golf followed by a pitcher of beer and shameless lying; rummaging through each others bookshelves and borrowing the latest Gerald Seymore; a game of backgammon on the beach on Sunday mornings, feeling slightly smug that we don’t have massive hangovers; enjoying the bittersweet sensation that comes with realizing that you will probably never again stay up long enough to watch the sunrise, but knowing that sunrises are best watched after 8 hours sleep anyway; going horseback riding on the beach and being grateful that you didn’t fall off whilst galloping past Ku De Ta. That sort of thing. And most of all, I wake up every morning being grateful for the facts that I live in Bali, love my work, am usually tolerated by my friends, and haven’t worn a tie for four years. Not a bad life if you can get it.