Category: Daily life in Dili
-
What’s Dili weather like?
I grew up in temperate Perth, where we have four strict seasons and a near-total lack of humidity. For that reason, Timor-Leste’s muggy humidity has repeatedly surprised and totally confused me. As I head into my last week of living here, I’m thinking more than ever about the girl I was this time two years…
-
New, new Dili favourites
At the beginning of this year I made a list of my new favourite places to eat and drink in Dili, a year on from my first round-up list. A hilarious and frank friend told me of that later list, “I thought you were going to say some new places, but they were they same…
-
March thoughts
Inside a tumble dryer this month turned me inside out upside down flip flop round and round. Big long stretches of deliberate, generous quiet; mad long days and giddy shrill nights; endless working days and the few first how are you feeling about leavings building slowly slowly quivering piccolo notes and louder now, crescendo crush, heading…
-
Visible, vulnerable, vivacious: do I feel safe in Timor-Leste?
Do I feel safe in Timor-Leste? It’s a question I’ve been asked a few times, and a topic I haven’t addressed directly on this blog. After work at my regular office job today I had to finish some transcribing for an article, and I decided I’d walk up to Kaffe Uut from home to…
-
Three quick pieces of advice
I received a lot of advice before I moved to Timor-Leste — advice that covered everything from what medicines to bring over, to where to do my language lessons, to how to deal with creepy bosses, to how keep busy when bored. Over the last two years, I’ve turned over, considered, accepted and disregarded these…
-
19 things making me smile today
A daily Dili dose of dopamine. Working quietly and alone, upstairs at Black Box, steady on a Monday morning Crisp local cucumbers ready for pickling in a pink plastic bowl New-to-me Tetun idioms; that fickle guy’s an ai-kakeu, the tree that moves with the wind Taking selfies with the chic dressed-up women in the orange office…
-
One way foreigners can help
Hi! If you’ve come here curious from Dili Expats, I’d love it if you could please read this whole post, including its post-script, before making a comment on that Facebook post. This blog is 1,044 words long, which will take you between four and five minutes to read. The last time I was back…
-
A letter to myself, 749 days ago
Dear Sophie, Hello, from 2019 — it’s 4:41pm on a Thursday after Indonesian class, you’re sitting up at Castaway with the sea breeze coming in and the light just starting to fade and blush over the esplanade, and you’re thinking, as you have been lately, about comings and goings. You’ve lived in Timor-Leste for about seven…
-
My landmarks in learning Tetun
A couple of weeks ago, my friend Laura and I signed up for Indonesian language classes. This surprised a couple of people, who asked us, fairly, why. We replied that we thought it would be fun; that we thought the language would be useful for us, and it’s got hundreds of thousands of speakers here…
Sophie Rai Liur 