Taking stock

In case you haven’t noticed, March is like Birthday Rush Time for me. I don’t know why I know so many Sun Aquarians and Pisceans, although I am related to quite a few of them.

So let’s take stock at the 4 month mark now, because I didn’t on Monday. DAMNNNN four months!!! That’s a third of our time here! That gives me a bit less than eight months to do this thesis, work with Herminio, actually get out to a couple of districts, etc. Sounds strange but remember I am working fulltime, I’m not on holiday here.

I feel like we are pretty settled here now with our routine, which ironically means that I want to see what I can do differently. Or not differently, but simply do. I’d like to go do some of the things we haven’t done yet. We haven’t been snorkeling. We’ve only been out of Dili twice – once to Ailiu and once about an hour to the west. Since we won’t be getting a car we can’t do this too spontaneously, but since we seem to get sick fairly often it’s hard to plan stuff as well, despite our abundance of free time. For example, we were going to ride our bikes down to Caz Bar and have breakfast by the beach last Sunday, because I finally felt well enough and like I had enough energy, but Matt was feeling unwell Saturday evening and Sunday, so we stayed home and I cooked brunch instead.

So I’d like to plan a couple of excursions – maybe we can try for one every couple of months. I’d like to go to Ailiu again; I’d like to go to K41, a beach about an hour from Dili (or 41 ks); and I’d like to just kind of explore. I’d also like to catch the ferry across to Atauro for a couple of days; and I’d like to find out what’s further away on the main island of Timor – apparently if you can take three days off, i.e. have a day to drive there and a day to drive back, there are a lot more districts you can visit.

Fortunately the fact I’m wanting to plan this now coincides with the fact that we are approaching the end of the rainy season (I hope, oh God how I hope). It’s not possible to go out to many of the districts in the rainy season and so I think from April-May to October is the best time to be doing this. I knew it was best to get the worst, rainy season weather over with in our first months!