Those are tourists, not worshippers. Bare feet are de rigeur on sacred ground, as you can see. If they were going into the mosque proper they’d have to cover their knees and elbows – a shop in the background has kebayas on display that they can use, perhaps for a small donation. The Sultan Mosque also has kebayas for non-muslims, but they are not as pretty.

In addition to being the historic home of the muslim Malay rulers of Singapore, this area was also the home of islamic scholarship in the area, and the transportation hub for Asian muslims making the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca.  They would make their ways to Singapore from Indonesia and Malaysia, settle their affairs, and pack onto ships for Mecca (before flights became available and affordable).  Some people made a nice business of organizing Hajj trips, and could advertise their services as “licensed pilgrim brokers.”

But not all Muslims who came to Singapore for the Hajj proceeded to Mecca.  Plenty of them stayed in the area around the Mosque, and were dubbed “Haji Singapura” – pilgrims to Singapore.

And at the end of the street farthest from the mosque, there’s the Halal Swedish Bistro!

I don’t know what that means, whether your Swedish meatballs are certified pork-free or whether the smoked reindeer was properly bled before being smoked, but there you are. I ask you, where besides Singapore will you find a halal Swedish cafe?

Chinese New Year is a 15-day period in which you stage many family reunions and feasts, in a particular order: visit the husband’s parents on the first day, wife’s parents on the second, and grandparents, uncles and aunts in descending birth order.  But in Singapore it’s a public holiday of just two days (the indians and malays man the transit systems and other vital functions while the chinese majority celebrates).  This is in keeping with the practice of fairness in allotting public hoidays to each major religion: Christians get Christmas and Good Friday; Hindus get Deepavali and Vesak Day (although since Vesak celebrates the birth of the Buddha you can argue that it’s really a chinese thing, but that first Buddha was Indian, so I guess it’s fair enough); Eid-ul-Fitre and Hari Raya Haj to the muslims.  Other public holidays are New Year’s Day and National Day.

Anyway we’re enjoying lazing around, so happy Lunar New Year, everyone. Prosperity, health and happiness to all!

Naturally, since it’s Bali it has to have sculptures, and the biggest one in the middle of the sanctuary is an ornate swimming pool or bathtub-cum-fountain for the monkeys.  They like it and hop in and out, and push each other around in the water like other primates I’ve seen.

The walkway to the bathtub has a concrete berm on the downhill side, where the monkeys line up.  They eat the bananas that people bring them, take naps, feed their young, and interact with people.  This boy scampered from the entrance to the berm and invited the monkey to play by sitting on the berm:

Note that the monkey has a buddy who has refrained from climbing the boy.  I don’t know if they take turns, or if they decided he wasn’t big enough for two, but at any rate they didn’t gang up on him, which was nice. Actually, after closer inspection I’ve decided the buddy may have been preoccupied with nursing her baby.

The monkey took it to a higher level….

Everyone’s happy, and we have a photo op for the boy’s mother.  And me, of course.

Of course there’s a temple in the Monkey Sanctuary.  It’s not dedicated to Hanoman, but it is definitely monkey-dominated, and I noticed that they don’t keep a lot of delicate materials in the most accessible parts.  You can see here the large sheltered platforms that would be used as dance venues ifa dance were scheduled.  Despite the monkey access they’re very clean, so they must have a pretty devoted attendant keeping them that way.  Human visitors must wear sarongs and sashes (available at the temple entrance) and then they can take even more monkey pictures.

Outside the temple there are lots of monkey statues along the walkways that divide the temple precincts from the surrounding jungle:

These statues look unnervingly lifelike.  For comparison here’s a live nursing mother with her tiny baby:

The only unlifelike monkey statue is the giant Hanoman at a different entrance, in an attitude of prayer that I didn’t see any real monkeys assuming; it must be Hanoman, as it’s wearing the sacred checked cloth sarong and has a wise and blissed-out expression appropriate to a devotee of Shiva:

The monkeys like statues as well as fountains:

Or maybe they just like climbing to higher places.  One grabbed the end of my pink umbrella and was considering whether he should climb up it, and then up my arm to the top of my head, but I persuaded him not to.

And that’s the end of my Bali blogging.  I’ve spent almost as much time editing photos and posting them as I did on Bali.  Which  means it must be time to go back and see some more!

Balinese tradition demands that every village have at least three temples in it, and Ubud is in addition the traditional seat of a royal family, which built its temple-style palace on the main drag.  So there are lots of extravagantly decorated and carved temples for a tourist to choose from. A short block from the palace is the Saraswati temple (Saraswati is the goddess of learning and music), which features a big lotus pond in front of the performance area where they stage Legong dances.  We stayed at the adjacent bungalows, whence we had immediate access to an outer temple courtyard, where food is prepared and people hang out informally for ceremonies, and then to the inner temple, where the more formal, sacred ceremonies are held.  When no ceremonies are going forward, the inner temple is where they keep the gilded gamelans (a series of xylophone-like instruments precisely tuned and hit with hammers) and gongs for the performances, and where they keep the sacred masks for the barong dances.

Here’s the gate from the inner temple to the performance area, complete with toothy guardian over the door:

In this inner courtyard were plenty of shrines and buildings of different sizes, all thatched with a particular black palm fiber used exclusively for holy buildings.  They were all open-air buildings, with carved and gilded wood pillars, and carved, painted and gilded bas-reliefs like this one:

There were statues here and there, in the shrines like this Ganesh:And like this fellow (I think it’s Ravana being attacked by Rama’s vulture ally while he’s abducting Sita, but I could well be wrong):There’s one statue that is completely uncovered, and that’s Saraswati herself, complete with her sitar,  goose and peacock, not to mention impressive headgear:

Saraswati is the main deity of this temple, so she gets two pictures.  That big stupa to the right is a traditional temple structure, depicting the Balinese cosmos. At the very bottom is the turtle who holds the world on his back; the two golden snakes of human earthly needs wind their way up the sides, and at the top (not visible in this picture because the sun was in the wrong direction for photography) is the empty throne that is the symbol of the overall one god, the supreme deity Sanghyang Widi Wasa.

But like most inner temple courtyards, this one houses both the gamelans and other orchestral instruments for sacred performances, and the barong masks:Note that the stairs to the barong shrine are guarded by the ubiquitous crowned snakes, the familiar representations of human earthly needs.  The barong, from what I’ve read, is kind of an expression of the good forces guarding and infusing humans.  When dormant it stays in its shrine in the temple, like this. But at particular seasons it comes to life, and then the mask is joined to a body thick with palm-fiber hairs, and the barong can go outside the shrine, and into the streets of the town itself, in dances in which it is pitted against the darker forces depicted in the masks to the right, the witch Rangda, her daughter, and a quasi-sympathetic henchwoman. Here’s a closer look at the barong:And below, the opposition, the Rangda and her buddies, with their out-of-control canine teeth.

We actually passed a barong ceremony and dance in the street of a village outside Ubud; the barong is a two-man costume, like the Chinese lion, and it sways around in front of a lot of formally-dressed villagers sitting on the ground in front of it.  We didn’t see the part where Rangda appears at the other end of the street and howls threats at Barong, but apparently that’s the drill.  There’s some sort of contest between them and Rangda retreats, although unharmed; the ceremony depicts the balance of opposing forces – a balance that everyone prays for in Bali, rather than the vanquishing of evil.  And evidently when not brought to life for the season of battle dances, the barong and Rangda dwell pretty peacefully side by side.

Have I mentioned that temples in Ubud are places of beauty?  Of course in Bali beauty is everywhere, in the scenery, the ocean, the flowers and jungle everywhere, the rice paddies and volcanic landscape, and in the little food- and flower-filled offerings provided at every little shrine, every big rock and tree of note.  And in the Saraswati temple they make sure that orchids add to the grass and pavements, the carving and gilding, the lotus pond and music:It’s a lovely place.

Anyway, they were painting this pavilion with the typical bright and beautiful temple decorations that you can see on a lot of fancy Chinese temples. I’d never seen temple painters at work, so I photographed them.

More arhats below:

Once you’ve completed your devotions or tourism at this level, you can follow the Buddha trail further up the mountain until you reach the top. At this level the trail ends and there are several structures: an old house that might have been the original monastery; two new temples, both air conditioned (! just like the Buddha Tooth Relic Temple in Singapore’s Chinatown!), that contain many ancestral tablets, and maybe a few ancestral ashes, for worship and remembrance. One of these new temples has an enormous seated Buddha with a glowing stone bindhi in its forehead. If you watch long enough the bindhi changes colors, from red to orange, pink to blue, green back to red. It’s an LED.   Again, alas, courtesy forebad the taking of photos.
But if you go outside and dodge the scent of stinky tofu wafting up from below, you can see a small red pavilion which contains a statue of the beloved abbot whose gilded corpse resides in the main temple area below. This area is adjacent to a Buddha-filled grotto, which is to some extent still under construction. Here are the golden Buddhas to keep the abbot company:

Here is the newly carved sleeping Buddha atop the as-yet-incomplete water feature:

Here is the lovely and popular GuanYin, the Goddess of Mercy, who when her scaffolding is removed will overlook the entire valley (will her bindhi change colors too?):

And finally, here is the sign in English that caps the entire experience for me:

Here’s the flagship dragon, with tropical fish along his belly:

Next on a floating platform we have the Monkey King and the Goddess of Mercy, Guanyin, with other pals from the Journey to the West.  Yes, the non-immortals are riding on a turtle whose head goes in and out of its shell:

Next five horsemen on another floating platform. The horses move back and forth on sub-platforms.   I know the middle one has to be Guan Yu, the great warrior. My friend says one of them is an immortal who ate human flesh – you can tell because he’s ugly. I am not sure I can distinguish him. The others I’m not sure about – they don’t seem to be from Three Kingdoms, which is Guan Yu’s story, so I guess it’s some other tale. Anyway, two views of them:

And finally, happy leaping golden-scaled fish on a floating platform in the foreground, with an entire bridge covered in a lantern with a coral reef theme in the backgroung, sponsored by the Underwater World aquarium.  You can’t see the pink dolphins leaping up and down, but they’re there:

Is this fun or what?

I have no idea who the nice little family might be.