~light of the world~

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

So far I've had three days or so of orientation, mostly in the residential college and a little bit of stuff in the main campus, and it's really tiring. I feek like I'm living each day very slowly, maybe because there's so many things to do.

I've made many new friends, especially those who are in my rooming group 2AB. Everyone at the college gets nicknames (don't know WHY) based on info about themselves or their names or could be totally random, so mine is Panda (please don't laugh), and my friends include Bones, Stanley (a girl), Elvis, Rashman, Spoon, Rocky, Shamwow, Gilly, Bora, Sahara, Tingle, Pixie, Squishie, Chansey, Brumby, Ben (a girl), Taxi, Keg etc.

Other names include F'Taang, Swede (he's not a swede though), Fluff, Brick etc. No one can pronounce my name except the China people, the Singaporeans and the Malaysians. I love Chinese people!

I've just done my 100 check point to confirm my identity with the medical building, and am sitting in a campus food court using the free wireless because I can't stand having to pay for the internet usage by the kilobyte in my room in the college.

Okay, I'm too lazy to post anymore.

Edit: okay, I have free time and shall post a bit more about tonight's shenanigans.

They had this compulsory formal dinner which I wanted to skip but couldn't. So we had to sit at pre-assigned places, thank goodness I had one of the other Singaporeans with me. The food was pretty good!

And then we found out we'd been pranked for what must be the umpteenth time already. The seniors had said they'd wash our fresher t-shirts for us, but what they did was to hang them all in funny places in the courtyard on level 1, like hung really high, or in the soil, or on benches or whatnot.

It was terribly noisy and all, but I did manage to direct a few people to their shirts, though not finding mine. So I gave up in the end and went up the usual way to my group's common room. I thought I'd walked to the wrong one again, but it turned out they'd swapped the decorations for each common room to confuse people.

It was really thorough, including the number plates and bathroom toiletries. At this point I concluded that the seniors had got to be the most kongxian and boliao people ever.

Apparently they managed to trick people into thinking that they'd swapped all the stuff in their rooms and switched the locks or something. I swear if they'd really done that it would be theft. And plus some people locked their rooms anyway.

A special shoutout here goes to Fluff. He came into 'my group's' common room (which was probably actually his common room) to take a golf club from behind the door, claiming he was trying to get a fresher shirt down.

Then later as people were going out to do the mass dance, he returned with a shirt and the golf club, and asked if anyone was missing a shirt, which of course I was! So I asked for the label, and found that it was indeed mine! He said he'd gotten it off a tree. A TREE.

I'd helped him earlier in the courtyard to identify Sahara's shirt to give it to her, so I guess he'd just gone around helping people get their shirts. Many thanks to Fluff the whipcracker!

Labels: college

xuan blogged at 1:26 PM

May your light shine...
in the darkness...

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

I haven't really had the time/energy to blog about my arrival in Sydney, but since I emailed my family about my adventure today, I'll just copy and paste it here, and then slowly backtrack the past few days.

Today Papa and I attended this welcome and panel/forum in the morning where we got some more information for international students, and got a small free lunch too!

Then we went back to New College to eat more lunch and then adventurously took a bus (with the help of the kind bus driver) to a terminal closest to the Sydney Opera House and Harbour Bridge! [Circular Quay]

We walked quite far from the wharves (which offer ferry rides) towards the opera house, and of course there were lots of tourists there, especially Chinese and Korean. We took lots of pictures with Papa's camera, so you'll get to see them when he gets home.

I think the Opera House and Harbour Bridge are really cool when viewed from far, but when you walk up to it, it's kind of ugly, I dunno. We also strolled around a little bit at these Botanic Gardens which are right next to the Opera House.

After that we were even more adventurous, and took a train from Circular Quay Station to Central Station and spent a long time in front of the map figuring out where the Chinatown is! Then we spent an even longer time walking there, but you can tell you're entering an Asian district when you see more and more Asian people, and stores with Chinese words on them!

There was a sort of small shopping centre on Dixon Street at the Chinatown, and it felt like being back in Singapore because of all the Chinese shops! But then Papa said he had to go buy a birthday present for baby Nathanael (18/2/09) and we got this cute panda stuffed toy from a Korean-owned shop.

Then in an attempt to be brave and find a bus stop to take a bus back rather than going round-about on the train and troubling Si Hui to pick us up, we found a better shopping centre where we bought me some Yeo's Chrysanthemum (6 x 250ml) and ate chicken for dinner!

We were directed by another waiting bus passenger to the correct bus stop far far away, and the stupid bus timetable is so inaccurate! Please lah, within 20 minutes the same number bus came like 5 times (more frequent than the timetable) and the bus we needed took 25 minutes to come when it ought to have been there in one minute or at a shorter interval!

Unfortunately since it was about 8pm it was pretty dark and hard to see the road names, but thankfully a lot of people got off at the UNSW bus stop near my hostel anyway.

I won't be seeing Papa tomorrow off at the airport because I already signed up for this academic preparation programme that's 8 hours long for Thursday and Friday, so I had to say goodbye to him just now when Si Hui came to pick him up.

It was fun being a tourist for today, but now I have to go back to being a student! I miss everyone back home!!

P.S. to everyone back home who sees this, please appreciate how great the Singapore public transport system is, including the EZ-link cards, cheap fare and frequent buses and trains!

Labels: sydney

xuan blogged at 6:26 PM

May your light shine...
in the darkness...