In Balinese culture, a man and a woman is considered to be complete when they are unite to form a family that worship common ancestors in the family shrine of each Balinese household.

Family ties are consequently the most important factor in Balinese life; a continuous sequence relates the individual to his family, to his community, and to the total of the Balinese people. A Balinese woman who marries Chinese, a Muslim, or a foreigner ceases to be a Balinese.

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The Seminyak Suite is located down a secluded laneway in the cosmopolitan district of Seminyak. The Seminyak Suite cater exclusively to the leisure needs of the international traveler.

The Seminyak Suite is composed of 17 tastefully designed private villas in a contemporary style that explores the attributes of Balinese living. Each villa is set within its own personal garden compound, featuring a swimming pool and all necessary home comforts.

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Branded residences are currently stamping their intentions on Bali, with Banyan Tree and St Regis promoting their upcoming developments in key markets across Asia, including Singapore, Jakarta and Hong Kong. Both resorts are scheduled to open in the first half of 2008 and are now focusing on early sales of their properties.

The 73-villa Banyan Tree Ungasan staged its first official public launch in Jakarta in mid-March, after about 20 units had earlier been sold or reserved in previews. “The weekend went quite well, with about 120 people attending and more than a dozen expressing serious interest,” said Johannes Suriadjaja, President Director of Sitiagung Makmur, the property’s developer and a subsidiary of Surya Internusa, whose previous hotel projects include Melia Bali Villas and Spa Resort, Gran Melia Jakarta and Melia Purosani Jogjakarta.

“This segment of the market is quite high end and many have heard of or stayed at Banyan Tree. Many were surprised to hear that they could buy properties at Banyan Tree Ungasan, because the likes of Four Seasons, Aman, Ritz-Carlton and Bulgari don’t have properties for sale in Bali.”

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As all things Balinese, Balinese villages are peculiar, complicated, and extraordinarily diverse. There is no simple uniformity of social structure to be found over the whole of the small, crowded countryside, no straightforward form of village organization easily pictured in terms of single typological construction, no “average” village, a description of which may well stand for the whole.

Rather, there is a set of marvelously complex social systems, no one of which is quite like any other, no one of which fails to show some marked peculiarity of form. Even contiguous villages may be quite differently organized; formal elements–such as caste or kinship–of central importance in one village may be of marginal significance in another; neither simplicity nor uniformity is Balinese virtue.

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Every temple in Bali, whatever its function or size, is the center of activities of a specific corporate social group. It is a permanent, well-organized association with commonly owned property such as the temple itself, temple rice field or land (pelaba pura).

In addition to carrying out the regular ritual connected with the temple, the group is responsible for physical maintenance of the temple, for its decoration with renewed stone carvings, and new cloth banners and for the provision of small and daily or weekly offerings.

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The size of a temple congregation (pemaksan, from the word “paksa” means obligatory work) may range from a few people, as in the case of a house yard temple, through several hundred up to tens of thousands, as in the case temple of Sad Kahyangan (six main temple of Bali). The priest of each temple is chosen among its members, either by hereditary succession, popular election or divine intercession via the trance of one worshipper. Since the duties of the congregation are generally considerable, there is usually, in addition to the priest, a secular chairman (klian pemaksan) in charge of the coordination of work and of the group treasury.

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BALI - With the launch of a new Qatar airways flight to Bali, the Indonesian government hopes to attract some 100,000 Middle Eastern tourists to the country.

From 4.8 million foreign tourists who visited Indonesia in 2006, only 56,000 came from the Gulf area. Qatar Airways offers four daily flights per week between Doha and Denpasar starting from March 28th.