Culture in East Timor

After a lazy but well deserved day, we wanted to do something cultural. We didn’t know anything about the culture of the country, so we decide to learn more about the nation’s culture.

We enjoyed visiting the places with our guide, because he knew more interesting things than the usual guide book that you can buy at a store.

Our guide was Pedro, a lovely native man.

So we started our visit at the beach, where we saw some old war houses, bunkers and other important buildings.

Did you know that East Timor is an independent nation, only for 11 years? In 1975 Indonesia invaded East Timor, this resulted in a war. The buildings we saw today were built for this war. Pedro informed us to watch the movie ‘Balbido’ , the movie tells the story of 5 men who were killed in the war of East Timor. Balbido is the name of an important war house, that we also visited. After these nice but emotional hours we wanted to visit the local cities. Since there weren’t many tourists, the local people were very happy to see us. We conceived a beautiful scarf , which was made especially for visitors. Now we have a nice souvenir.

We could sleep at a local family’s house if we wanted to. In the beginning we hesitated because they were all strangers, but we couldn’t miss this chance, so we decide to do it.

A family of 2 children invited us to their house, they were very kind and we decided to buy a present for them.  The night was hard because the beds were made of straw. But we had a very nice time!

Eline