First thing to know: if going out at night is your thing, East Timor is not your place. It can get very quiet here at night. Out in Los Palos, I can usually be found at home either sleeping or reading a book. If I feel the need for company, I walk a few houses down to the CONCERN office and have a beer with Brian. CONCERN is an Irish NGO doing the same thing we are in the other half of Lautem District. Brian is the Irish guy doing for them what I'm doing for IRC.
On Saturdays things get a bit crazy around here. The Koreans set up a big white screen out in the field next to their compound and show Karate movies dubbed into Korean. The Timorese don't seem to mind; practically the entire town flocks out there each week. As they gather, the Koreans show a nice propaganda film depicting them saving East Timor. I usually end up either at the MDM (Medico De Mundo??- Medicine of the World) having a beer and trying to understand Portuguese, or I wander over to the UNTAET offices to have a beer and try to understand their English.
Our first restaurant in Los Palos opened two days ago. For 5000 Rupiah (US $0.80) you can get some rice, some greens and a bit of meat - probably buffalo or goat. I haven't been there yet, but my field coordinators tell me it is OK.
Anyway, if you really want to go out you've got to go to Dili. Every Saturday some NGO is throwing some kind of party. Last weekend there was a pretty good one over at the IOM compound (lots of locals and a decent keyboardist, but the beer never had a chance to get cold.) If it isn't Saturday, or if no one could think of a reason to throw a party, there are a few other options. Well, two actually. There is either the Dili Hotel or the Boat. The Dili Hotel is comprised of a few tables with umbrellas outside the hotel next to a shack that sells cold beer and a few spirits. The Boat on the other hand is a whole different story.
The Boat is also a hotel, and was ordered here by the UN. Most of the hotels, rest houses, etc. in East Timor have been destroyed along with the rest of the city. Now, when you have all your hotels, rest houses, and the rest of your city destroyed, you find yourself in the middle of an international incident, and with an international incident comes reporters, photographers, UN representatives, donors, etc. who all need a place to sleep at night. So the UN ordered two of these big container ships that have been converted into hotels. Most of the time these ships are used by the oil companies to house the employees of their oilrigs. Anyway, both boats have a bar on them. One, the Heli-Bar, is a heli-pad toward the back of the ship that has been converted into a fairly decent bar. You can get pretty much anything you like, the beers are really cold, and for food they have a cheese burger and chips combo for $10 Australian.
They have a good sound system that can even be heard over the massive roar of the generators used to power the ship. They were showing movies on a big screen TV for a while, but it didn't go over very well because you couldn't hear the film over the music that was trying to drown out the roar of the generators. The bar on the second ship is not so nice. It is down towards the bottom of the boat and hasn't a single window. As you walk into the lobby of the hotel, if you take a left past the toilets there is a heavy metal porthole type door marked "Bar."
When you heave that door open, you step into a dive bar with two pool tables and a couple of neon beer signs that could be any dive bar in any city in the world. Very strange. Anyway, the problem with both these bars is that they don't let locals in unescorted. Besides not liking the racism behind that, the bars are usually filled with Australian tradesmen who drink way too much and UN diplomats in transit who keep to themselves. Not a real fun crowd. I prefer the Dili hotel where you are more likely to run into someone you know, and if you can keep him or her from talking about work you can have a pretty good time.
For those of you who care about such things, the beer of choice in East Timor is Victoria Bitters. Australians call it their best beer; I call it a competent lager. It's beer in a can - what do you expect?