The Mission here, UNMISET has ended and was replaced with the “political” operation UNOTIL. In practice, this means that people are pulling out of this place. There are fewer and fewer internationals around. The UN area is quieter, there are fewer customers in the restaurant/bar at the Barracks and the shop there seems emptier by the day. There’s been parties because people are leaving. I too will soon leave this place. It all feels very, very melancholic.

This job really has been a lot more than just a job out of town. It’s more like a large community working and socializing in an organical village in a bubble. You work with some people, you hang around with some. You know a lot of people. Some have become real friends, some close acquaintances. And it feels melancholic that i might never again work in an environment where i have friends, colleagues and acquaintances from (now) 35 countries. It was especially clear at the end-of-the-mission-party at the UN barracks a week ago when the DJ shamelessly mixed music from all corners of the world and everybody seemed just to fit in.

Last weekend marked the Third Anniversary of the Restauration of Independence in Timor-Leste (the 20th of May three years ago is not seen as the Independence Day here — the logic goes that Timor-Leste was independent, if only for a week and a half, in 1975 when Portugal left and before Indonesia came). The Usual Suspects eloped town and spent the long weekend in Baucau instead. And an excellent weekend it was. The journey from Dili to Baucau is an exceptionally beautiful one, probably overshadowed only by the journey back which for some reason shows the shoreline, the mountains and the road winding between them in an even more breathtaking perspective.

The beaches of Baucau also are rather stunning even in their state of nonkeptness. The place certainly could sustain a small and ecologically sound tourism for people who do not fret the sometimes rather bumpy ride to get there or the very local town where you won’t have to struggle not to see other malae. Our plans for the weekend included beaching, pooling, swimming, the occasional kayaking, sunning, eating, drinking … and as little else as possible. I believe we succeeded. It was great.

Saturday night, in what then was a very dark house, i managed to break the right-side lens of my glasses. Bummer. I would like to say that the cabinet i placed the glasses on rejected them (resulting in a high pitched, short and expensive “klirr”) but of course it was only me and my clumsiness to blame. Since Dili does not have the facilities to create a replacement lens, i had to take a quick trip to Darwin, Australia, to get a new one. But before that, there were a couple of forms with a total of i think seven signatures. And hunting signatures is not the easiest thing to do, especially when the most critical signaturists were on a retreat, thankfully in Dili. And then the application needs to be submitted through one office of the UN which governs me, to another one that governs the airplane traffic … and then you wait until the evening before departure to see if you’re clear to go or if you’ve dropped off the priority queue.

Thankfully i was on the list of passengers, which meant a very early wake up call for Wednesday. It took me 25 minutes to get my eyes open and drag myself into the shower, but i’ve learned my own bad habits well enough to allow for enough of slack in the time table. This only meant there was less coffee time at the airport — fair deal for me — though i did manage to make an arab friend of mine who works at the airport nervous enough to call another arab friend of mine at six-fifteen in the morning to ask for my phone number… We’d joked about it the evening before that if i’m not there by six-thirty, he would call and wake me up. The plane leaves at seven, with or without me (which of course means waking up at 6:30 is grossly too late). Or with, this time.

Two hours later i touch the ground at Darwin International and set my first foot on Australian ground. Nifty. From the airport, it was a taxi to the optometrist, to where i was over an hour before my scheduled date! This is getting truly unusual. Of course i couldn’t have my eyes checked on somebody else’s appointment, so i had some time marvelling over the civilization, but when i returned for my appointment, there was the surprising message that the return flight had been moved backward by an hour! This left us two and a half hours to check my eyesight, grind new lenses (as it turned out, they didn’t have the glass lens i use, so to have the same optics on both sides, two lenses were needed) and taxi to the airport. Well, hoopla, it turns out that the optometrist my eyes are checked at do not have the lenses, so i take the taxi to their other office “downtown” — a ride that takes nearly half an hour.

I must tip my virtual hat to the detective work of the airline personnel. While i cannot figure out how they managed to call the optometrist i was having my eyes checked at without my telling them anything of that (i did leave my international=cell phone number with the applications though but this information must not have reached the agents in Australia). Now, i have seen a couple of episodes of LAX but i hadn’t figured that truth can be just as unlikely as fiction. Hadn’t i received the message, i figure they’d left without me and i would still be in Darwin, without a laptop or a change of clothes. Duh.

While two polycarbonate discs were formed into less geometrical shapes to fit my frames, i did some quick shopping. The work got finished slightly before time. I pay my bill, confirm with the airport that i have received the message and am indeed coming to today’s take-off and then rush for a taxi to take me to my flight. Not much time for sight-seeing on my first ever trip to Australia, but at least i got a small fluffy koala for my daughter and get to the plane with time to spare. What a strange day. What a strange life. Not being late. I am fascinated and intrigued!