When a friend offers to connect you with someone living in the country you're visiting, it's a gamble on both sides; it's like an international platonic blind date. You could get keen insight into the country and helpful travel advice, or...well, any number of alternatives are possible. So we really lucked out with Zach and Nila - Zach was site mates in Peace Corps with my grad school friend Nicole, and he's been living in Jakarta for the past three years. We met him and his girlfriend when they came to Bali for the weekend, and it's not an exaggeration to say that they're some of the nicest people I've ever met.

Our meeting (in Bali, at least) almost didn't happen . We arranged to meet at the oddly named Potato Head restaurant, which we assumed would be small and homey (I don't know why...I guess potatoes seem homey). I didn't know what he looked like, but how hard could it be to find each other? As it turns out, Potato Head is a massive, trendy bar-slash-restaurant with a resort atmosphere that caters to wealthy tourists, both international and Indonesian. There were multiple bars on multiple levels selling $12 drinks (that's 100,000 Rupiah!) and an expansive lawn down the middle. The real action, though, was at the pool. Arranged around the pool (with swim-up bar) were large lounge beds with slim, attractive women draped over them, sipping cocktails and taking pictures of each other. I'm sure there were men, too, but this place was all about women on display. It felt like a movie set. The place was huge, and we didn't even know who we were looking for. We decided that our best bet was to wander around looking pointedly lost and out-of-place (not a stretch) so that Zach would surely recognize us . We also yelled out the occasional tentative, "Zach!" whenever we heard an American accent. We wandered around in this goofy daze for about an hour, and just when we had given up and were getting ready to leave, they found us.

In the end we had a lovely evening - Potato Head is surely not a place we would have found on our own, and we were glad for the excuse to see this face of Seminyak. Zach and Nila are both really interesting people, full of stories and information about various parts of Indonesia. They also had us laughing all night. Honestly, it was a best-case-scenario for the international platonic blind date.

On Saturday, I joined them for a day of diving near Lovina, on Bali's north coast. Shen stayed behind thanks to a nagging cold. The diving centered around an "underwater temple." The temple materials had been discarded in the ocean when a new one was built, and the dive companies had reconstructed the original one where the stones lay . The dive was, first of all, one of the calmest I've ever done. No current, no surge - I could just set neutral buoyancy right above the coral, and there I'd stay until I decided to move. I love that. The temple was very cool; corals and other sea creatures had encrusted the carved stone of the temple, creating an overlay of natural beauty over manmade art. I was also astounded by the diversity of the coral and the tiny critters living in it. I can see why Indonesia is known for its diving! We saw tons of nudibranchs (well, not tons...they're pretty small), a sea pen (a new one for me!), mating cuttlefish, and lots more.

On the way home, my companions made me try the most fearsome fruit in all of Asia: the Durian. Just how fearsome is it? Apparently some restaurants have signs that read, "No Smoking. No Durian." The smell is so pungent as to be prohibited. Some people love it, but I discovered that I am not one of them. To me, it tastes like once-delicious fruit that was left out in the sun too long...and then something died in it. It's that bad. The taste lingered in my mouth for hours afterward, even after I had eaten dinner. But three in our group munched away happily, so there must be some genetic predisposition to liking the taste.

Despite the Durian debacle (no, I do NOT want durian toothpaste), it was an awesome day. The only thing missing was my wonderful husband. Aside from that glaring deficiency, it was a great day of diving with fun new friends - what could be better?