Tag: expat
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Top and bottom 10, month #3
My ten favourite things about living in Dili, at the end of my third month here: Dancing so hard I split my jeans Home-delivered vegetables Tetun idioms Cooking dates Finding things less hard the second time Booking flights to Bali Booking flights to Bali in Tetun (!) Lunch invitations from the cool girls A friend…
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Are you an expat or an immigrant?
For three months I’ve been calling myself an expat without thinking about it. That’s what it means to be a foreigner working abroad, right? Not necessarily. Today, I read this great post on Fabulous Fusions, quoting this BBC article, which made me pause for the first time and consider what I really should be calling…
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More power
Picture this. You live in a society that uses electric power. One day, your house senses you’ve used too much energy, and that your allocated stock is running low. It sends you a warning. You respond immediately, and walk to the front of your house to receive a code, which you then punch into the…
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Trade expectations for gratitude
A hokey piece of internet wisdom I came across last week: trade expectations for gratitude. I very likely saw it hand-lettered on a pastel Instagram post. #wisdom However jejune its philosophic depth may be, the quote stuck with me as I navigated an exhausting week. I toyed with, and liked, the relatively high bar it set:…
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“Can you speak Tetun yet?”
A question I had reading the later entries of expat blogs before I left Australia, and something I thought about this morning, feeling teary and helpless on a microlet, bleating deskulpa hau la komprende – I’m sorry, I don’t understand. I’ve been living in Dili for three months now – the first filled with daily four-hour-long…
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How I spent a weekend at home
After finishing Live Below the Line last week, I was looking forward to a slower weekend – one where eating banana-peanut butter toast would feel as thrilling as getting out of Dili for a dive trip. There’s not a coral reef as beautiful as banana and peanut butter in my eyes On Saturday, I slept…
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Keeping your balance
Most Tuesday evenings, I do a yoga class at Dili Wellness run by my friend Emma. Every week, she takes us through a gentle ashtanga-like sequence that generally follows the same pattern of every other yoga class I’ve done – but with one notable exception. Emma puts the balancing poses near the end of the…
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FOMO for Fitzroy
Scrolling through old phone photos in a never-ending quest to free up my iPhone storage space, I ran into a trove of pictures I’d taken in my last few weeks living in Melbourne. Buried behind rows of Dili sunsets and sweat-streaked selfies sit neat shots of my Victorian terrace house; croissants captured halfway through a…
Sophie Rai Liur 