During my first week in Thailand I went to a restaurant near Khaosan Road and ate green curry. It cost thirty-nine baht. At this stage I was still fairly green myself and I had yet to suss out the tipping situation. I was under the impression that forty baht was a lot of money so I paid with two twenties and went on my way, leaving what I thought was a respectable tip: one baht.

Later it occurred to me that the waiter probably didn’t even realize it was a tip. Something similar happened in Bali. My girlfriend and I were clueless as to the value of rupiah (far too many zeros) and we ended up giving a thousand-rupiah tip to the bellboy, which I think works out about 10 baht.

In Thailand I usually tipped any shrapnel (coins) handed back or else 20 baht. The main places to tip are restaurants and bars. I wouldn’t usually tip after buying a bottle of beer, but might have for a bottle of whiskey. Vendors of street food don’t expect tips, but most restaurants do. I hate being given change in one of those folding wallets, but there’s no escaping them.

In Dili I’m faced with a tipping dilemma: do you or don’t you? The issue seems to be a point of contention in expat circles. Some people tip at every opportunity while others see this as setting up a level of expectation from foreigners. I’ve already seen that, like the Thais, the Timorese see foreigners as rich. I don’t know if there is any level of resentment.

So far I haven’t being tipping in Dili. I don’t think it’s expected and I don’t want it to be. It seems common only in the Western bars and restaurants out here and therefore tipping is reserved only for expats and foreigners, which I think is ludicrous.

The best tip I was ever given while working as a barman in Sheffield was seven pounds. It was given to me by an extremely drunk girl who’d recently been paid some kind of loan, possibly her student loan. I should have declined the tip, but I was saving for my travels and wanted the money. The girl then stalked me for about two weeks and even turned up at my house one night. The life and times of Matt Crook.

What do other people think about tipping?

I never really gelled with the expat scene in Phuket. In Bangkok it was different because in a city that big you’re bound to meet so many people that at least a few of them are worth sticking to. Since I arrived in Dili I’ve seen a completely different type of expat scene. The foreigners living in Dili are, for the most part, passionate about whatever field they work in, be it tourism, aid, peacekeeping, journalism. More so than that, there’s a sense that many of these people are dedicated to Timor-Leste.

From one day to the next in Thailand people just moaned about the state of the place. It’s not that people shouldn’t be able to criticize the country in which they live, but here in Timor-Leste the expats see an overwhelming positive side, despite everything that has happened and could still happen. I haven’t been able to pinpoint why this positive mindset exists, but I imagine it stems from foreigners living here and working in jobs they’ve devoted at least part of their lives to.

The nightlife scene in Dili is interesting. There are more bars and clubs than I thought there would be. Almost all are aimed at foreigners, but I get the impression that the people running these nightspots to support themselves do a lot of work in the community.

About a week ago a bunch of us ended up at a Mexican party. It was surreal: a Mexican party in the middle of Dili. There were hundreds of people there and I heard “Macarena” twice. I didn’t really dig the party because I’m kind of anti-social in large groups of strangers.

My friend and I snuck out of the party around midnight and walked back home. We passed a little shack where half a dozen local ruffians were playing pool. What the heck, we thought, and we rolled up to the shack to say hi.

We put up a buck-fifty and played a game of two-on-two pool that involved shooting the balls in ascending order while one guy turned over playing cards. I never found out what the playing cards were for, but through sheer drunken luck we won the game and got back our buck-fifty and, I think, the stake of our opponents.

Although my end of the conversation was limited, hanging out with those bare-chested kids, who looked to be in their early-twenties, was a better deal than being at the party. This all happened on the road where just a few nights before an old, haggard man had stalked me down the street.

More than anything I’m enjoying being a part of the local community here. As tough and wary as the locals look on the outside, they are good, warm people and I feel humbled to live among them.

Note: For some strange reason I posted a draft of an unfinished blog post (this post) and gave it the headline and picture of the post I was trying to publish, which is actually about tipping.

Thailand has Sangsom whiskey, Japan has sake and Timor-Leste has… palm wine. I’d gone on a mini-road trip with a Timorese man and his young son. We’d been out to see the statue of Pope John Paul II. The trip was only about five kilometers or so, but it involved rides in two mikrolets and a 30-minute walk before we ascended the hill to the statue. On the way back we passed a group of kids sat beneath a tree drinking “local wine”.

The local wine turned out to be palm wine and we came across a woman selling it by the side of the road. I’d previously thought the woman was selling some kind of petrol. “You want some?” I asked my friend. He did.

I really only wanted a cup full, if that, but ended up with a 1.5-liter bottle of off-white liquid. First impressions were that it smells like raw eggs. I took a cautious sip and shuddered at the strong, bitter taste that bore no resemblance to any kind of wine I have ever drunk. My friend took a big gulp while the lady selling the wine looked confused.

I bit the bullet and took a bigger sip, but the combination of the potent smell and the overpowering taste made me reel back for a moment. I coughed a little and decided that my palm-wine-drinking days would be short-lived.

In the end I spent 50 cents on the enormous bottle of wine, which my friend was glad to divvy up into two bottles: one for me and one for him. I thought, Perhaps I could save it for special occasions.

The mikrolet journey back was marred by the omnipotent odor of the palm wine. My friend drank a little more and when we got off the mikrolet he confessed that he was a little drunk.

Palm wine, my friend told me, is made from the young leaves of palm trees. What I bought is the unboiled version; the boiled form of palm wine costs $2 or so for a 600-milliliter bottle.

Palm wine is what the locals drink. It costs about the same as water and is an awful lot cheaper than imported beer. It’s an acquired taste that I’ve yet to acquire, but with perseverance I’m certain a person could grow to love palm wine.

I never thought I’d come across a drink that could match rice whiskey, but palm wine is it. My small bottle of wine remains untouched, hidden in a shoe-stand where its outrageous aroma can go undetected.

You can tell that people in Timor-Leste have a sense of sense of humour just by listening to the wide variety of car horns that people have. Not content with a simple beep, the Timorese have all manner of interesting horn styles, some of which are so distracting that I end up stopping my bicycle just to see what’s going on.

Some horns start off with a regular beep followed by a series of successive beeps decreasing in volume until the beep is no more. It sounds kind of like a beep driving off into the distance beyond the horizon, when in fact the car responsible is right next to you.

The ones that get me every time are the tuneful horns, which blast out a quick melody of beeps, sometimes followed by a successive series of quieter melodies. You’d think the circus had come to town, but it’s usually just a microlet (like a tiny breadbin of a minibus) looking for passengers.

Some guys have gone the whole hog and made their cars into spaceships by making their horns sound like lasers. The whole thing is just so ridiculous that you have to laugh. Nobody has a clue what’s going on with the diverse assortment of beeping styles. I never know whether I’m coming or going or who is beeping at who and for what.

If there were more cars on the road, like in Bangkok, this place would be chaos. As it is, most people don’t really know how to drive and so the average speed of a car in Dili seems to be only about 40kmh.

I hope to goodness that Dili doesn’t become like Bangkok in terms of traffic; there would be thousands of accidents every day. You should see some of the manoeuvres the UN vehicles pull.

By Matt Crook and Domingos Fernandes (Voice of Culture)

DILI, EAST TIMOR: Disgruntled Timorese living in one of Dili’s camps for internally displaced persons (IDPs) were told on Tuesday that the verification process that will allow many of them to return home will begin on Wednesday, although thousands more remain in IDP camps around the district.

For the full story please visit The Voice of Culture.