Parents making their teenagers kiss in public? A village in Bali does so once a year.
Following Nyepi — a day of silence for Balinese Hindus marking the Saka New Year — Banjar Kaja in Sesetan, Denpasar, holds Omed-Omedan, a kissing festival for local teenagers that is believed to ward off bad luck in the year ahead.
The story goes that the festival began “a long time ago,” but nobody quite knows when. A group of bored teenagers were hanging around, playing games outside on Nyepi near the house of an elderly village leader who was sick. When the leader stepped outside to scold the laughing teenagers, he instantly felt better.
The festival has been held ever since. In the 1970s, it was moved to the day after Nyepi to respect the silence edict. There was only one year that the festival did not push through and locals say that on that day, the head of the community found two pigs fighting outside the main temple. Unable to separate them, he took this as a sign that the festival needed to continue yearly to maintain harmony.
Being in Bali over the Nyepi holiday, I headed to Banjar Kaja on Wednesday to see the kiss fest for myself.
The festival is held in the afternoon so not to disrupt the tradition after Nyepi called Nyembak Geni, where Hindus visit each other to pray and ask for forgiveness. Before the festival, participants also visit the temple to make prayers and offerings.
When I arrived, Balinese rock and punk bands were taking center stage and teens were dancing and singing along. After the official guests arrived, the entertainment took a more traditional turn, with barong dancers and singers, along with a gamelan orchestra.
But the crowds kept swelling in the narrow street where the event was held. Pretty soon, I found myself being pushed back into a pole with someone else’s baby holding on to my head, a random child occupying the gap between my thighs and toes, and with the complete inability to move my left arm, while a man puffed kretek smoke in my face. It also felt like someone was using my generous backside as a pillow. But sometimes, these are the trials we must endure to see something interesting.
As beautiful and talented as the dancers were, nobody got to kiss them, so the crowd was anxious for the main event to go ahead. The teenage boys looked like they were particularly ready for Omed-Omedan, standing in groups, shuffling their feet and laughing anxiously, looking too cool for school in their traditional headpieces and sarongs, official festival T-shirts and topped off with hipster sunglasses. The adults then started to round up the teens while spraying the crowd with water to both cool us down in the scorching heat and hype everyone up. Boys blushed but walked off to perform their manly duty and girls squealed and tried to hide behind each other.
“I’m too young!” “I’m too old!” “I’m too shy!” they squawked, as they were coaxed, or pushed from the audience. But despite the initial displays of reticence, they eventually gathered in the space that one man told me was called the “kissing fields,” with girls down on one end, boys on the other.
The first step was to parade the guys and girls before each other in circles. Nobody near me in the crowd could explain exactly why, though one relaxed guy in a tie-dyed T-shirt might have gotten it right when he shrugged nonchalantly and said: “Excitement. Entertainment. Look, it’s funny.”
It was pretty funny. The two groups were trooping past each other, sneaking sideway glances, squealing, giggling, whispering, almost tripping over their own feet in youthful awkwardness. Most of the participants looked to be around 14 to 16 years old.
Once again, they gathered into groups of girls and boys at each end of what would become more than a kissing field — it ended up being more like a make-out runway.
A girl and a boy is selected from each side one pair at a time and hoisted up onto the shoulders of the group. Then, under the careful direction of community leaders who were taking on the job of directing the pair like air traffic controllers with a complicated series of hand signals, the two sides rushed forward with the boy and girl on their shoulders so that lips could lock.
The crowd went wild as soon as the chosen ones went for it in their enthusiastic yet somewhat awkward display of passion and community obligation.
But the ever-responsible adults were ready to keep the situation under control. After about 10 seconds of lip-locking, it was cold shower time for the lucky pair who were sprayed with hoses and buckets of water.
Then, the tribes regrouped, each picking a new victim. The process was repeated about 10 or more times, every time with no less enthusiasm, water or shoving.
We saw awkward kisses with girls’ and boys’ lips tightly pursed, pecks on cheeks, partially open-mouth affairs complete with a few sneaky gropes and kisses where the boy effectively managed to miss the girl’s mouth completely. “That’s her ear!” screamed an older man near me to one boy who was having trouble with his sense of direction.
But perhaps the loudest screams of all were heard when the group of cheeky youngsters took to the stage, pushing the village leader and his wife into the crowd and hoisting the couple up on their shoulders for what was probably the most timid kiss of the day.
Before attending the festival, I wondered what the atmosphere would be like. In this antipornography law land, the event has come under some scrutiny in recent years. However, despite the very public displays, you couldn’t accuse this event of being anything more than fun.
With the kissing over, the music continued until late in the evening. I hobbled out, completely drenched with a severely bruised toe, a broken flip-flop, a rib cage covered in elbow-sized bruises and not even a kiss on the ear.
Following Nyepi — a day of silence for Balinese Hindus marking the Saka New Year — Banjar Kaja in Sesetan, Denpasar, holds Omed-Omedan, a kissing festival for local teenagers that is believed to ward off bad luck in the year ahead.
The story goes that the festival began “a long time ago,” but nobody quite knows when. A group of bored teenagers were hanging around, playing games outside on Nyepi near the house of an elderly village leader who was sick. When the leader stepped outside to scold the laughing teenagers, he instantly felt better.
The festival has been held ever since. In the 1970s, it was moved to the day after Nyepi to respect the silence edict. There was only one year that the festival did not push through and locals say that on that day, the head of the community found two pigs fighting outside the main temple. Unable to separate them, he took this as a sign that the festival needed to continue yearly to maintain harmony.
Being in Bali over the Nyepi holiday, I headed to Banjar Kaja on Wednesday to see the kiss fest for myself.
The festival is held in the afternoon so not to disrupt the tradition after Nyepi called Nyembak Geni, where Hindus visit each other to pray and ask for forgiveness. Before the festival, participants also visit the temple to make prayers and offerings.
When I arrived, Balinese rock and punk bands were taking center stage and teens were dancing and singing along. After the official guests arrived, the entertainment took a more traditional turn, with barong dancers and singers, along with a gamelan orchestra.
But the crowds kept swelling in the narrow street where the event was held. Pretty soon, I found myself being pushed back into a pole with someone else’s baby holding on to my head, a random child occupying the gap between my thighs and toes, and with the complete inability to move my left arm, while a man puffed kretek smoke in my face. It also felt like someone was using my generous backside as a pillow. But sometimes, these are the trials we must endure to see something interesting.
As beautiful and talented as the dancers were, nobody got to kiss them, so the crowd was anxious for the main event to go ahead. The teenage boys looked like they were particularly ready for Omed-Omedan, standing in groups, shuffling their feet and laughing anxiously, looking too cool for school in their traditional headpieces and sarongs, official festival T-shirts and topped off with hipster sunglasses. The adults then started to round up the teens while spraying the crowd with water to both cool us down in the scorching heat and hype everyone up. Boys blushed but walked off to perform their manly duty and girls squealed and tried to hide behind each other.
“I’m too young!” “I’m too old!” “I’m too shy!” they squawked, as they were coaxed, or pushed from the audience. But despite the initial displays of reticence, they eventually gathered in the space that one man told me was called the “kissing fields,” with girls down on one end, boys on the other.
The first step was to parade the guys and girls before each other in circles. Nobody near me in the crowd could explain exactly why, though one relaxed guy in a tie-dyed T-shirt might have gotten it right when he shrugged nonchalantly and said: “Excitement. Entertainment. Look, it’s funny.”
It was pretty funny. The two groups were trooping past each other, sneaking sideway glances, squealing, giggling, whispering, almost tripping over their own feet in youthful awkwardness. Most of the participants looked to be around 14 to 16 years old.
Once again, they gathered into groups of girls and boys at each end of what would become more than a kissing field — it ended up being more like a make-out runway.
A girl and a boy is selected from each side one pair at a time and hoisted up onto the shoulders of the group. Then, under the careful direction of community leaders who were taking on the job of directing the pair like air traffic controllers with a complicated series of hand signals, the two sides rushed forward with the boy and girl on their shoulders so that lips could lock.
The crowd went wild as soon as the chosen ones went for it in their enthusiastic yet somewhat awkward display of passion and community obligation.
But the ever-responsible adults were ready to keep the situation under control. After about 10 seconds of lip-locking, it was cold shower time for the lucky pair who were sprayed with hoses and buckets of water.
Then, the tribes regrouped, each picking a new victim. The process was repeated about 10 or more times, every time with no less enthusiasm, water or shoving.
We saw awkward kisses with girls’ and boys’ lips tightly pursed, pecks on cheeks, partially open-mouth affairs complete with a few sneaky gropes and kisses where the boy effectively managed to miss the girl’s mouth completely. “That’s her ear!” screamed an older man near me to one boy who was having trouble with his sense of direction.
But perhaps the loudest screams of all were heard when the group of cheeky youngsters took to the stage, pushing the village leader and his wife into the crowd and hoisting the couple up on their shoulders for what was probably the most timid kiss of the day.
Before attending the festival, I wondered what the atmosphere would be like. In this antipornography law land, the event has come under some scrutiny in recent years. However, despite the very public displays, you couldn’t accuse this event of being anything more than fun.
With the kissing over, the music continued until late in the evening. I hobbled out, completely drenched with a severely bruised toe, a broken flip-flop, a rib cage covered in elbow-sized bruises and not even a kiss on the ear.
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