I was home alone again last night and there wasn’t much to do so I decided to go out and have a walk around. Two months ago, when I first arrived in Timor, I walked down the street where I live and thought everyone was trying to attack me. With hindsight I can see that I was being paranoid, but at the time I was in a new country that I knew very little about.

So I walked down the same street and groups of people greeted me and I stopped to chat with a few of them. They asked me where I was going and what I was doing. A few kids knew my name, although when they said it I think they were calling me Max, rather than Matt. One child half-heartedly asked me for a dollar and I smiled at him.

I got down to the end of the road and turned left towards the stadium where I met a group of about 10 guys sat on the pavement. “Tua sabu?” they asked. I drank a lot of tua sabu (palm brandy) when I was in Ainaro so I decided to join the group of ruffians by the road.

Two months ago I’d have been terrified of this group, but now that I’ve settled in I’ve seen a different side of Dili. There are some dangerous areas, as there are in any city. Even the Timorese will tell you that out towards the airport is a dodgy spot.

We drank together for about half an hour and then I went down to Motion bar to read some of my book. I stayed at Motion for an hour and then walked back to meet the street kids again. I say “street kids”, but these guys were all about my age or older.

We drank and smoked and talked about the things guys talk about: football, girls, smoking pot, life. We talked about how Real Madrid are more concerned with looking good and making money than playing with heart. They told me that it is better to be single and free than to be married. It is, apparently, difficult to sleep around in Timorese culture without ending up tying the knot.

The conversation turned to prostitution at some point and there was also mention of an Irish man’s wife. At least one of the guys had been getting intimate with the wife.

We all agreed that it’s silly to have a national language – Portuguese – that nobody can speak and that English is more useful. They were very apologetic for not being able to speak fluent English and I was sorry for being so bad at speaking Tetun.

Eventually we ran out of tua sabu and I figured it was my round as I’d been drinking their booze all night. We walked down a muddy backstreet to a house where a lady sold us two liters of tua sabu for three dollars.

We carried on drinking. One of the guys was so drunk that he fell asleep on the sidewalk. Another lost the ability to speak coherently before a bus arrived and he left for Viqueque. I was drunk out of my mind on dirty liqueur. It was about midnight and I confessed that I was going to have to go to bed.

The rabble decided to walk me home so we stumbled back up the road towards where I live. I was struggling to walk in a straight line. Before I knew it, I was at my door with my gang in tow. We shook hands and there was the offer of hanging out again.

I opened the front door and found my way to bed. My head was spinning and I spent a long time contemplating throwing up before I passed out asleep and woke up ten hours later.

It was a good night because foreigners in Timor spend a lot of time talking about how there are so many groups of young men hanging around on the streets at night with nothing to do. I figured it couldn’t hurt to talk to these young men and get to know them a bit better.