East Timor

14 days now in Timor land or Timor-Leste (that is the country’s official name), by the way Leste means East in Portuguese language, English speaking people might prefer to call it East Timor.

I still have flashbacks of Basra and Tallil (Iraq), see I just came back from Iraq and supposedly this place would be heaven compare to Iraq, but so far I am not really sure. Iraq was fun, yes it is dangerous place and all that, but I had great friends there, and we shared good and bad times.

East Timor, land of coffee and something like that, I am still trying to discover the place. All I knew about this place prior to my arrival was conflicts, stone throwing and burning houses, I didn’t even know the capital is called Dili. I googled a lot before coming to Dili, but it seems people like to exaggerate when they write something about anything and post it on the internet, the place is not bad, people are friendly, though they seem to be very quite, easy going and stair at you as if you were an alien from another planet.

It could be a lonely place, even though it seems the whole world is here, AU and NZ army, and UN personnel, everywhere you go, you see UN civilians and Police, UN vehicles are seen all over Dili, the UN headquarters is called Obrigadu Brack which means “Thank you very much” in the local dialog, didn’t make sense to me, but hey everyone seems cool with it. At UN everyone is friendly and everyone is smiling all the time. I could get use to this, see in Iraq no one smiles for no reason, no one smiles at all, it is rare to see anyone smiling, and if somehow that happens and someone smiles to me, I would be like what the hell and go paranoid about it, ask myself all sorts of questions, “who is he? Does he know me? Where does he belong to? What the hell was that?” crazy shit haa?

Today is Sunday, I came to the office to do some email writing and try to find a constructive way to kill time, and I don’t even know what I did yesterday, that is how boring this place is to me for now. I am still exploring my options for things to do in Dili, people are telling me, lots of stuff to do, nice places to go and things to see, I will see about that.

It is a small world…

I met two guys from Australian army, had a chat with them, prior to this job I was working with the Australian army in Tallil (Iraq), apparently those two guys know the guys back in Iraq, they were even the same regiment, we talked a bit, took pictures, probably they will send these pictures to the guys in Iraq to say “what a small world” and have something to talk about, maybe I should do the same, since I have email addresses of some of the guys back in Iraq.

I think I will just go to my little room and watch some DVDs, I could be the only guy in this world who watched every single movie Hollywood produced; I am literally becoming a movie library, pick a movie name and there would be 99.9% chance that I have seen it.
It is almost 13:30H, I better go back to my room and see what movie I haven’t watched from the hundreds of DVDs I got from the market, maybe call home first, then go, yeah I think I will do that.