Meeting Wayan by Elizabeth Gilbert Eat, Pray, Love

Meeting Wayan by Elizabeth Gilbert Eat, Pray, Love

The book Eat, Pray, Love was at the top of the New York Times bestseller list for a year. Author Elizabeth Gilbert writes about her search for self after a devastating divorce. She spends four months in Italy eating fabulous food, four months in India meditating in an ashram, and four months in Bali finding love and contentment. I read Eat, Pray, Love shortly before my trip to Bali.

Wayan was my favorite character in the book. She is the owner of a small healing shop and restaurant in the city of Ubud. Elizabeth Gilbert rides her bike in Ubud and falls, injuring her knee. She goes to the store to get an ointment to heal her wound and ends up befriending Wayan and her sweet, irrepressible daughter, Tutti. Wayan has left an abusive husband and is struggling to survive on his own because divorce carries such a strong stigma in Balinese culture. Wayan is often forced to move her business from one rental location to another and therefore struggles to retain enough established customers to be financially successful. Elizabeth Gilbert appeals to American friends to donate money to buy Wayan her own store. It doesn't take long for Gilbert to raise $18,000. Before leaving Bali, Gilbert sees Wayan settled into a mortgage-free two-story building.

It's not hard to find Wayan's store. Gilbert's book says it's a few doors down from the post office in Ubud and that's exactly where my friend Kathy and I found it. The hand-painted sign outside the door invited us to get a massage, learn Balinese dance, buy medicinal plants, eat a healthy vitamin lunch, or be cured of whatever was making us sick. Huge pots on the front patio of the store contained various herbs such as ginseng, jasmine and aloe vera. Each pot had a sign that told you what diseases that particular plant could cure.

We went in. The restaurant had three tables. Wayan met us and after escorting us to the one available table, he asked if we had come to eat or to be healed. We told her we were hungry after a morning of wandering the shops and galleries of Ubud, so she and her assistant started bringing food to our table. They grated turmeric and mixed it with ginger, honey and water to make a delicious juice. They brought us three types of seaweed, each flavored differently. We ate uniquely flavored melons and tomatoes served on banana leaves. We had rice and salad. As each dish came to the table, Wayan told us whether it was good for our stomachs, our kidneys, our hearts, or our love lives.

Wayan said for just a small extra charge we could get a healthy body check at the end of the meal, but she was very busy when we finished eating doing body checks for a group of French women sitting at another table. I noticed that one of them had a French copy of Eat, Pray, Love in her bag. The book has been translated into more than thirty languages.

Since Kathy and I knew that our husbands would already be waiting for us at our hotel, we decided to leave. We say goodbye to Wayan.

One of the things I like to do when I travel is read a book set in the country I'm visiting. It makes the place come alive for me. I don't always get the chance to actually step into the pages of the books and meet any of the characters I've read about. Luckily, I was able to do that in Bali.