{"id":403,"date":"2008-11-04T06:29:17","date_gmt":"2008-11-03T23:29:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.vincentfung.ca\/wordpress\/?p=403"},"modified":"2011-03-18T19:47:28","modified_gmt":"2011-03-18T19:47:28","slug":"whats-up-portugal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vincentfung.ca\/blog\/archives\/403","title":{"rendered":"What's up Portugal??!"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Did you know that over 90% of the people in Timor-Leste are Catholic? I guess after 400 years of Portuguese colonization, people pickup a few things. Religion, culture and language have definitely been affected by this 400-year rule. Even the local language of Tetun\/Tetum<\/a> has bits and pieces of Portuguese injected into it. According to a taxi driver I talked to last week, there is approximately 36 different dialects in this new small country.<\/p>\n

The main part of Timor-Leste<\/a> is only about 300km across, which means on a good day you can drive across in about 5-6 hours. I’ve been told the roads outside the capital, Dili, are in pretty bad shape and sometimes only wide enough for one car to pass. So with the upcoming rainy season, driving around will be a challenge. I drove around over the weekend and started to make my way outside Dili. A usual activity for a lot of people is to wake up early in the morning to go for a walk, run, cycle. So on Sunday morning, we woke up early to beat the heat and made our way to a church on the outskirts of Dili. At the top of a long staircase was this massive Pope John II statue to commemorate when the Pope came to Timor-Leste in 1989.<\/p>\n

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Markets are commonplace in Dili. While there are lots of cars on the road (there’s about 1200 UN cars on the road alone), most people walk to get anywhere or catch microlets (small mini vans). Taxis cost USD$1 to get anywhere in the center of town, but it’s really at the discretion of the taxi drivers – there aren’t any meters in the car. And in a couple of instances, when I hopped into the taxi, there was already another person in the car!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Did you know that over 90% of the people in Timor-Leste are Catholic? I guess after 400 years of Portuguese colonization, people pickup a few things. Religion, culture and language have definitely been affected by this 400-year rule. Even the local language of Tetun\/Tetum has bits and pieces of Portuguese injected into it. According to … Continue reading What's up Portugal??!<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":402,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[124],"tags":[20,22,3,28,29,126,64],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vincentfung.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/403"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vincentfung.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vincentfung.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vincentfung.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vincentfung.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=403"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.vincentfung.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/403\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1989,"href":"https:\/\/www.vincentfung.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/403\/revisions\/1989"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vincentfung.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/402"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vincentfung.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=403"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vincentfung.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=403"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vincentfung.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=403"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}