Week 1 - Dili

Bonoite!

Finally got around to starting up a blog. I'm not sure if I will get to write on it much or how many people will check it, but it just seems easier to write things that Naomi and I see and do on here rather than send thousands of emails week in week out and/or spam everyone's facebook.

This is our 4th night in Dili and up until today it was all a bit of a blur. We left Canberra on Tuesday evening, had a brief stop at Brisvegas and landed in Darwin at about 1am Wed morning. Had about 4 hours sleep at the airport motel and headed back to the airport to fly to Dili.

I think we set a new world record with luggage, our luggage managed to grow by over 10kg in Canberra and we checked on just over 91kg of luggage between the two of us and would have easily had another 30kg in carry on. It was something to behold! We did however have to pay $150 in excess in Darwin with Air North, which wasn't too bad, they gave us an extra 10kg allowance each. But the awesome people at Virgin managed to squeeze all our excess luggage on for free on all of our flights around the country.

Getting off the plane was interesting, having been in Canberra for the last 2 weeks with a maximum temp of 13 in that time and a few mornings at -5 degrees it was a rude shock to step off the plane into 28ish degrees and some pretty heavy humidity. Being that little bit closer to the equator the sun just seems to have so much more bite. The temperature in the mornings is really nice up until about 9am then the sun is just scorching until the late afternoon.

We were picked up at the airport by our In Country Manager (ICM) and taken for a nice ride from the airport, which is almost at the northern most end of Dili through the center of town down to one of the restaurants on the south side of the city. That ride through the city I got a fair taste of what Dili is all about, not having been overseas before alot of the things I saw I found really out of the ordinary. Men carrying fish hanging from bamboo sticks on their shoulders, dilapidated boats in the harbor, dogs, goats, chickens and other animals roaming the streets, at one point we had to stop the car while a mother pig (she was HUGE) and her piglets crossed the road, mind you that wasn't on the main strip that was in one of the suburbs.

The restaurant we ended up at for lunch was a Chinese restaurant right on the beach, in fact I took the photo that is the background for the blog at the moment from where I was sitting with my lunch! Not a bad spot, especially considering I had an amazing chicken fried rice for only $4! In fact the food has been really good all around and really cheap depending on where you go for food. We had some pretty tasty Indian today, there were 5 of us eating, myself, Nemo, Tom, Karen and George, which are 3 of the other volunteers from our Pre Departure Training in Melbourne. We probably had 7 main dishes, 3 big naan breads, a few rice dishes and a couple beers/chi tea/waters each and it was $31 bucks. Tonight we ate at an Indonesian buffet type place and that was even cheaper, Nemo and I had a meal and a drink each and it was only $7.5.

A couple of shots from where we had lunch just after we landed

That first night was just as surreal as the lunch on the beach. We were invited to come to a party held by the family that runs the place which we are staying for the first couple of weeks here in Dili. We werent sure what the party was for at first, and we thought that it might just be a few people having dinner. It turned out it was the families daughter's conformation and it was a massive event, even though it was a Wednesday night there would have been 40-50 people there! They were so generous,  they asked us to be involved, invited us into their celebration, brought out a new beers quicker that we could finish the one before it and put on a massive spread of food (we saw the pig during the day that was part of the feast, but when we saw it it still had hooves, eyes and a tail, that was interesting) and asked nothing in return. It was also two other girls birthdays that night as well, so that made the night even bigger. Nemo and I got a photo with the girls who were celebrating their birthdays and conformation. The mother of one of the birthday girls delivered a speech to thank everyone for coming and just go over why we were all there and why it was such an important night for the girls. She did that speech first in English, then Bahasa Indonesian then in Tetun! Pretty impressive!

The people in Timor Leste are.....smaller that I was expecting, the blokes are small and the girls even smaller, you'll see what I mean in the photo, the girl in the white (it was her confirmation) was the tallest Timorese there, including the adults!

The view from the front door of our room

The Thursday and Friday we had more courses and orientation type things to do and a few items to organise like power adapters, mobile phones and toilet paper. 1 things that I didn't realise before I came was how little people are able to speak English in Dili. I knew that when we get out to the districts English would be rare if heard at all, but at least we would have had a few weeks of language classes behind us and some practice on the locals in Dili. But the truth of it is that there are very few Timorese that speak English. We are lucky enough that the family that runs our hotel speak it quiet well, but the staff at the local super markets, restaurants and stores mostly don't speak a word.

At restaurants and super markets I've found its relatively easy to get by without knowing the language, mainly because the locals are so tolerant of Malay (which roughly translates to people not from here, but if you are white then to the locals they just call you Malay) but also because you can just point to or pick up what ever you want to buy and then just give them the money. But when Naomi and I went to buy mobile phones that was another experience in itself. They didn't speak a word of English, and us not a word of Tetun or Bahasa. We needed to try out some phones, ask them to change the language settings on the phone so we could read it, ask to buy adapters to charge them, we had to barter, it was a nightmare. That said we got it done, though it did reinforce the fact that I need to make an effort to learn the language and quickly. I felt so ignorant, even though it was my first night and there wasn't really any way I could have done it differently, if it was me in their place and I was back in Australia and a foreigner had walked into my store and tried to get me to serve them and they couldn't even speak my language I would have been pissed off, insulted and angry, but these girls did it with a smile.

We did have one funny moment in the store when buying the phones. The girl was busy working on the phone settings, occasionally looking at us and asking a question in Tetun, we of course had no idea what she was saying. Then eventually her boss came over and asked her something, to which she replied "something something no comprehende" Nemo and I got really excited because we know that in Spanish/Portuguese comprehende means understand (Tetun derives alot of its words from either Portuguese or Indonesian) and we started smiling and repeating at them "yes yes we no comprehende". All the girls in the store cracked up laughing, we hadn't said two words in the last 10 minutes, choosing to communicate in hand signals and points as it is more universal then all of a sudden we are both loud and smiling saying that we don't understand, I think they had already figured that out.....

Even though we had only put in 2 and a half days of work/orientation it was a massive relief to finish on Friday arvo. It was just mentally sapping taking in all this new information, living in a city that doesn't speak English and taking in the humidity that I needed a rest. So we went to the local expat bar for a few not so cheap beers, some expensive food (relative to the local food, still miles cheaper than Perth) and a game of footy! I think I had seen about 10 Malay (white people) all day wondering around the city, but that night in the bar there were 50 or 60, flies to a lamp. But the beer was cold, it was awesome to have  a dirty big oily pizza as a change from all the Asian food and the footy, even though the teams were terrible and because the crows are useless and gave away their massive lead I missed my multi, it was a damn good night!

Sunset from the balcony at One More Bar (the xpat bar)

Today we had the luxury of a nice slow morning, bit of a sleep in then we headed to the other end of town, near the Presidential Palace to a bike store to buy us some wheels. We figured Dili isn't all that big and push bikes were a pretty good way to get around and the exercise isn't going to hurt either. We had Indian for a late lunch and decided to head down towards the south end of the city for a bit of a ride and maybe a swim. On the way we went past a bunch of guys in little 4wds who had made a bit of an extreme 4WD track in the mud next to one of the beaches. Most were in tiny little rav4 type cars and were making these things hurt, absolutely flying around this track, I don't think they intended them to make it to the end of the afternoon. At the end of the track was a jump, most went over it fairly quick and got a little bit of air, but one of the guys hit it so fast he would have cleared about 5 meters and got at least 5 or 6 foot of air, madman! Naomi didn't get a pic of the jump but there is one of the track and a few of the bystanders, including a horse which was standing right next to us as we watched....

After watching the 4WDing for a while we starting riding again headed along the beach. By the time we got to the beach in front of the Kaz Bar, we took a seat on a few of the chairs in the sand out the pub. It was a pretty good spot, the waitresses come up to you and take your order and bring you the beer, while you sit there and watch the sun go down over the water.........

So that has been our first 4 or 5 days in Timor Leste. I know I rambled a bit, but if I left anything out mum would either kill me or ring me every night, I'm not sure which is worse...... kidding :-) Tomorrow we are thinking of doing another bike ride to the top of one of the local mountains, but not sure if it will happen or not yet. Probably just have a quiet day and get ready for next week, where we both get to go to the Dili officies of our new jobs and meet the staff and we have 4 hours of language training per day as well. So that should all be a bit of fun.

Thanks for reading (if you made it down this far) and sorry if was a little hard to read, I am completely knackered!

Ben and Naomi