Bali for my Birthday

So given my long history or completly hating my Birthday I decided to take myself to Bali for a couple of weeks to get away from the reality of my life and also the reality of turning another year older. I decided on Bali for 3 reasons:
1) Its cheep
2) I have never been there
3) The woman who wrote 'Eat, Pray, Love' went there and a medicine mad healed her broken heart, so I figured he could also heal mine.
So I headed off to Bali after a couple of big nights drinking with Geraldine and her ever suffering husband Byron, I say eversuffering simply because he has to endure me being there with my emotional "condition" and my tears and my drinking and talking rubbish all the time and he endures it like a champion, as does Geraldine.....so after coming close to missing my flight because of an alcohol enduced coma I boarded my flight and was off.
On landing I wanted to be sick. The heat and humidity hit me and my hangover like a thick fog of reality and suddenly I was in another country. Shit. What the hell was I going to do now was all my mind could process.
I found my driver and headed towards Ubud, where the woman from 'Eat, Pray, Love' had stayed. I had no idea what I was doing in this place. I hadn't worked out what I wanted to do or where I wanted to go, but driving into the place made me feel calm and collected and really quite at peace.
I settled into my hotel and found my way around and before I knew it the place felt like home. I really fell in love with the place and felt that I might never leave, and if I did, I most certainly would come back, many times. It just felt like home.
I started reading the booklist my shrink had given me many months before and started to annalyise my life and the things that had happened in the last year and even in the time before then and started to reconcile things in my mind. Most of all I started to accept a higher power. Not god or anything of a religious nature. Just the power of the universise to deliver things, good, and bad, and for these things not to be a coincidence or 'fate' as I had always explained them as before, but actual happenings for some greater reason, one that may take some time to discover. All of this was fine, to a point, but there was and still is so many things about this I am not sure I completely understand - I guess time will tell or I will work out that I belive in something different.
So sitting and eaating breakfast on my first morning in Ubud I got talking to one of the locals who works at the hotel I was staying in. He was young, very young, but cute and it seemed to me that he may be flirting with me, although I quickly dissmissed this as I realised that I was about to turn 33 years old and was more unattractive now than I have ever been in my life and could not posibly think what he could find with me that was worth flirting with.
He asked me many questions, the usual, where was I from, was I here alone, where was I going and who was I going with. He asked me if I was going to see Kutut, the local medicine mad who was made famouse by the recent phonominan of 'Eat, Pray, Love'. I was embarressed to tell him that I was indeed planning to get a few seconds of this wine mans time, but of course, it was only for fun. I didn't think it was worth mentioning that it ws really the main reason for my coming to his beautiful country!
His name was Abut and he was handsome. He was also quite charming and although I knew I shouldn't, I agreed to meet him at 11am the following day to go and see a medicine man that he promised would be so much better than the famous Kutut. He said Kutut was like a movie star now and simply inundated with people and had little time to spend with anyone. I didn't belive him. This was not the Kutut I had read about and seen in the movie!
Later that morning I was walking around, well further than around, quite a waay out of town, I was walking through villages and seeing things that bought back memories of my honeymoon with my ex-husband. I figured it was just the fact that I had not been in Asia for so long that basicallially everything looked the same, but it didn't at the same time, it all looked so wsonderful in the hills of Bali. Ubud, I decided, was one hell of a beautiful place, especially if you got up early befor the humidity!
I had seem a dog on my way out of town. Well I had seen many, but this dog needed help. It was sick as could be and skinny and its eyes had rotted in its head from the infection. I cried just seeing it and told myself at the time that I would just have to deal with that if I was going to enjoy this place because I had heard that dogs are not treated well here.
On my walk back from seeing many wonderful things I once again came accross this same dog. I couldn't leave it this time though. I felt that I had to do something for it and I just didn't know what.
I went to the closest 7-11 type store and searched the isles for something to feed it. I found a small can of corned beef and bought it for about 2 cents and took it outside. I was scared the dog would be gone but he was still there. I opened the can and scraped the food out with my finger and he ate it with such furosity that I cried at how hungry he was.
I wanted help for the dog and was approached by a local taxi driver who offered to help. We tried to catch him and put him in the taxi but the dog was so sick and crazy from its illness that there was no persuading it.
The taxi driver offered to drive me to the animal welfare where he assured me I could find someone who would help and perhaps I could organise an ambulance for the dog. I was sceptical buit agreed. I had nothing else to do for the afternoon and hell, I had to try, I couldn't live with muself if I just left the poor thing here to die a slow death.
I drove with the txi driver to the animal welfare place and walked in and was greated by an amazingly tall man, a vet, crouched down and washing two little puppies who were suffering a horrible skin condition, one that is all too common in Bali.
He was busy and yet spoke to me without annoyance or frustration and was at that time, and in my eyes, a simply amazing man. He was calm and patient and accepting of this situation or horrific circumstance and yet wanting to help. I felt instantly the same. I organised an ambulance for the dog I had found and come here to find help for and then offered to volunteer my time to help these beautiful animals. I left with a smile on my face and felt that perhaps there was a reason I had come to bali after all.