Meeting with Wayan by Elizabeth Gilbert Essen, pray, love

Meeting with Wayan by Elizabeth Gilbert Essen, pray, love

The book Eat, Pray, Love was at the top of the bestseller list of the New York Times for a year. The author Elizabeth Gilbert writes about her search for herself for a devastating divorce. She spends four months in Italy to eat fabulous food, four months in India to meditate in an ashram, and four months in Bali to find love and satisfaction. I read to Bali, pray, love.

Wayan was my favorite character in the book. She is the owner of a small healing business and restaurant in the city of Ubud. Elizabeth Gilbert rides in Ubud bike and falls injured on the knee. She goes into the store to get an ointment to heal her wound and finally friends with Wayan and her sweet, overwhelming daughter Tutti. Wayan has left an abusive husband and has difficulty survival alone because the divorce in Balinese culture has such a strong stigma. Wayan is often forced to move her business from one rent location to another, and therefore has problems keeping enough established customers in order to be financially successful. Elizabeth Gilbert appeals to American friends to donate money to buy Wayan her own shop. Gilbert doesn't take long to collect $ 18,000. Before leaving Bali, Gilbert Wayan sees set up in a mortgage -free two -story building.

It is not difficult to find Wayan's shop. Gilbert's book says it is a few doors further from the post in Ubud and that's where my friend Kathy and I found it. The hand-painted sign in front of the door invited us to a massage, learned Balinese dance, bought medicinal plants, ate a healthy vitamin lunch or let us heal everything that made us sick. Huge pots on the front terrace of the shop contained various herbs such as Ginseng, Jasmin and Aloe Vera. Each pot had a shield that told them which diseases this particular plant could heal.

We went inside. The restaurant had three tables. Wayan met us and after accompanying us to the available table, he asked if we had come to eat or heal. We told her that we were hungry after walking through the shops and galleries of Ubud in the morning, and so she and her assistant began to get food at our table. They rubbed turmeric and mixed it with ginger, honey and water to make a delicious juice. They brought us three types of algae, each seasoned differently. We ate uniquely spiced melons and tomatoes served on banana leaves. We had rice and salad. When every dish came to the table, Wayan told us whether it was good for our stomach, our kidneys, our hearts or our love life.

Wayan said we could have a healthy body check at the end of the meal for just a little surcharge, but she was very busy when we were finished with the meal and made body checks for a group of French women who were sitting at another table. I noticed that one of them had a French edition of Eat, Pray, Love in their pocket. The book was translated into more than thirty languages.

da Kathy and I knew that our husbands would already be waiting for us in our hotel, we decided to go. We say goodbye to Wayan.

One of the things I like to do when I travel is a book to read that plays in the country that I visit. It makes the place alive for me. I don't always have the opportunity to actually enter the pages of the books and meet one of the characters that I read about. Fortunately, I could do that in Bali.