Bali life: The housework edition
Hey guys! Today I thought I’d share an insight into Bali life, the everyday things that we do to keep our little budget apartment running in Bali (this post reveals what we spend in 1 month in Bali).
So, without further ado, here are the 10 weird household chores that we have to do now that we’re living Bali life:
- Every evening, catch and release all the baby geckos from the house (if we don’t they dry and shrivel up and we find them dead behind a bed or desk, like a chocolate on a hotel pillow but Reptilian Horror edition).
2. Catch and release cockroaches, about once a week (that’s how often they turn up, we don’t have a fun cockroach-pet-pen that we empty weekly). These things are super-beings; they get through any crack or crevice and they eat everything. Once in Thailand I discovered one eating the bristles of my toothbrush. Cockroach priority #1 = good oral hygiene.
3. Change the gas bottle on our two ring hob (the only cooking facility we have). It’s like camping, but indoors, in a really hot country.
4. Draw “ant chalk” lines around every bathroom drain, along each windowsill and along the bottom of the front and back doors so that the bitey-bitey ants won’t come in and join us in our beds, as they have done one too many times. (Spoiler alert: it’s not chalk. It’s a stick of pure toxic poison moulded into a shape that is appealing for kids. Well done, guys).
5. Use an electric tennis-racquet type thing to stun all the flying giant red ants that congregate around our living room light, and then sweep them out of the door. This is more fun than I care to admit.
6. Chase and ninja-clap to death all the mozzies in our apartment each evening (I realise that the amount of death in this evening routine is perhaps more than the average). The kids act as spotters for this; Eira is pretty much ready for a ranger job in the plains of Africa, spotting dots of wildlife from miles away.
7. Brush the sand off everything, all the time. Pillows, bedsheets, sofa cushions, dining table, floor, everything. Walk outside to put sand out of apartment; get sand on feet. Repeat.
8. Adjust the air con so you don’t suffocate in the heat but also don’t get cold skin. So far the magic balance is: fan on low, temperature at 16. You’re welcome.
9. Fetch and change our water supply every couple of days- a 19 litre bottle that sits on top of our fridge. This involves wiping an alcohol wipe over the lid each time to ensure bacteria doesn’t get into each new bottle when it’s pierced. We take the old bottle back each time and it gets sterilised and refilled for sale again.
10. Obsessively wipe and clean up any little crumb or drop of food, anywhere, because the new three-second rule is that after three seconds all the ants will come. Wondering if there are any ants left in the UK or if they are all here, trying to get into our kitchen. Let me know.
So, that’s about it for our Bali life post today! Is there anything you’d like to know about Bali life? Let us know in the comments!
Check out more travel posts from our time spent full time travelling through Thailand, Sri Lanka and Bali before we made the move to Bali long term!
Delyth Jones says
I’ll give tHe insect farming a miss thanks! But i do fancy the tennis racket! And i can confirm tHere are plenty of ants left here in the uk!
Alyson Long says
Sounds very similar to Australia, only we have a lovely spray can of death-to-all-bugs that stays on the surface of application for weeks – callled surface spray. But no matter what you do the ants just keep coming. And because our hpuse was rented for 6 years we came back to cockroaches. I bought sticky cockroach baits but after catching a gecko in one and freeing it with coconut oil, those had to go in the bin. But our geckos live in the house just fine, probably because we don’t run the aircon much, never at night. we never get mosquitos in the house because we keep the screen doors shut, but flies, jeez, open the front door for a fraction of a second and the dreaded ozzie flies are in. i have a fly sway for that. i cannot live with flies. and then there are the cane toads, but i can’t kill them – vegan see.