I have lived in Japan and China and have now been living in Indonesia for most of this year. It is still taking me time to try and understand how people think here. The longer you stay and the more different experiences you have, the more things you pick up everyday.

The pace of life is slow here in Bali, which is one of the attractions for me to live here. Balinese people spend most of their time meeting their friends, attending ceremonies, talking, cooking and eating. When they get on a motorbike however, it’s as though they can’t spare a minute and just have to get to their destination in a heart beat. The result is some very nasty accidents. I am sure many of them are due to speed and reckless overtaking more than anything else. Once people get to their destination they are more than likely only going to be sitting around drinking coffee and smoking, so I am always wondering what could the rush be?

I am now interested in buying a house here. The house I am interested in, is only small but it had a vacant block of land next door which was included in the price. The land would have been good for a swimming pool, extending the existing house, or even building a brand new house to live in or rent out.

The seller explained that it was on a separate title, which was fine with me. We had a meeting with the seller and the notaris this morning and discovered that the seller didn’t even own the vacant land and it was his “friend’s” land. His friend is currently working on a cruise ship and it would be some time before he got back to Bali.

The seller has bought and sold properties before, so I wondered how he thought he would be able to sell off a piece of land that wasn’t even his and didn’t have the title for the land. The house by itself is nice enough. A foreigner had been renting it up until now and it is a comfortable enough place to live and I am sure can be rented out fairly easily.

I just can’t work out why the seller wasn’t upfront about who owned the land. He said he had his “friend’s” permission to sell the land. Yeah, right! I have seen the house a couple of times now and the owner keeps dropping the price, because he says he really needs money. I am still interested in the house, so I made an offer much lower than what the seller wants.

I wonder now how he will react. I imagine most people would just walk away from the deal. What do you think you would you have done?