University of Melbourne and Sandringham

It has been a long week. Or what appeared to be like it. My exams unfortunately didn’t go well—an Investment paper last Thursday was easily the worst among the three, even though it was an open-book exam, we’re still so constrained by time. My subsequent two papers on Friday, Empirical Studies in the Equity Markets, and International Trade, were mediocre, although by the end of a crazy writing marathon induced by Empirical Studies’ exam (which had my handwriting curved into a nearly unintelligible mess—I hope not—as I was trying to write four research papers in the span of 3 hours but only managed 3 and a quarter, le sigh), the joints in my hand felt an unfamiliar pain, and consequently, my mind was not at its peak performance to be able to perform well.

In short, I blame this semester’s failings on:
1) The university’s despicable scheduling
2) Trying to get used to the teaching methods employed in Melbourne

I’m a bit miffed that despite pouring in a ton of effort I’ve never seen myself doing in previous semesters, I’m underperforming at the worst level possible. -_-

So a huge backlog of what I’ve been up to:

Thursday, 22 October 2009

On the pretext of attending a Halloween event organised by Kelvin’s (our neighbour) international students body of University of Melbourne, we went over in the evening.

We ate at a Malaysian/Indonesian/Singaporean cuisine-served restaurant, and had mixed rice (“zhap fan”) for dinner. Mine was $AUD6.50 (~RM20) for three types of dishes, and I wasn’t even full. That amount of money could easily net me 4 simple meals or 2 mid-range meals in Malaysia. >_>

Passing by.

We were taken on a tour around University of Melbourne by Desmond, who’s an engineering student there.

A pathway.

A row of bicycles.

Part of The Old Quadrangle.

Trying out a shadowy effect.

Helping Kelvin and his friend to set up an area for some Haunted Walk that night.

LMAO! Hilarious notice plastered in many places throughout the university, with additional such notices available for picking up at the brochure area. Since it’s not too clear from the picture, it says, in verbatim:

FUCKWITS

Recent propaganda by neo-Nazi scum — Nationalist Alternative — has been appearing around campuses in Melbourne. To our knowledge, there have been two types of stickers, titled ‘Put Local Students First’ and ‘Radical Autonomous Action’ respectively.

With Regards to the ‘Put Local Students First’ Nat-Alt stickers, borrowing rhetoric usually associated with Leftist politics, namely access to tertiary education and the student housing crisis (SHAC House, et al.) and the wholesale reappropriation of the ‘hip’ aestheticism of ‘radical’ student activism utilized by Socialist Alternative should come as no surprise to those familiar with the Far Right’s history of parasitically appropriating Leftist politics and struggles in order to further an agenda of white supremacy and racial separatism. The logical conclusion of this agenda being the horrific and murderous logistics of purging all ‘undesirable’ people within Australia — People of Colour, Queers, ‘reds’, Jews, those deemed as ‘ZOG’ affiliates, et al.

That these fuckers are active and organising in our community should be abhorrent to all of us.
So please, help keep our community & campus nice, clean and Nazi free.
If you see Nationalist Alternative propaganda, remove it.
If you see anyone posting Nationalist Alternative propaganda, please precede en masse to kick their fucking heads in.

A community message kindly brought to you by:
The Hippy Death Squad
UP AGAINST DA PUNX — MOTHERFUCKER!

Some of the sports facilities in UoM.

Running tracks.

Some of the people practising Wing Chun (no shit).

UoM twilight.

See if you can spot me in this dark, with a-wrong-angle photo.

Fun, funky structure to play with.

A candid of me walking off.

We didn’t eventually stay for the Halloween night event, as I had wanted to study instead (==v_v==). And as we were still hungry consequent of eating expensive yet unfilling Malaysian food, we went over to the Maccers at Vic Mark (Aussie way of shortening words, see if you know what they mean wtf) and I chose to eat the Angus beef burger, at a premium of $6+ just for the burger alone wtf.

Contrary to what Ethan warned me, I thought it was quite tasty, although with the steep price I won’t be eating this again.

Thursday, 29 October 2009

This is a story worth telling. I had three alarm clocks set up the night before at 5am so that I won’t miss my exam in the morning at 9.15am (I’ve a nasty habit of sleeping straight through my alarms), in the following order:

1) The alarm in my phone
2) The Windows 7 alarm clock gadget in my laptop
3) Ethan

Guess which one managed to wake me up?

The first two failed. The alarm clock in my phone had somehow stopped working all of a sudden, but I set it up anyway just in case it worked. The second alarm in my laptop worked just fine… except that I forgot to crank up the volume and my earphones were still plugged into the laptop. -________-

Ethan managed to wake me up after three missed calls—he was staying up till late to work on his take-home exam. I had actually told him that if he felt like sleeping, he shouldn’t stay up on my account, so thank god he didn’t listen to me… >_>

This picture was taken at 6:42am at the Southern Cross Station / Spencer St stop. I went over to the Flagstaff Railway Station to pick up at 10x Early Bird ticket (if I were to use it to arrive at any destination prior to 7am, it’s free), then used it to ride to Southern Cross Station which was merely a station away.

I then took a 96 tram heading towards St Kilda Beach and tried to validate my ticket.. with some sort of error. -_- Right when I try to be a law-abiding citizen…

I reached the Melbourne Sports & Aquatic Centre at 7am, and was most amazed to see people coming out from the centre after a swim. I dunno if this swimming/gym-ing at such deathly early hours is a common occurrence in Western countries, or whether this already happens in Malaysia and I’m just blissfully unaware of it, simply because I don’t wake up so early.

At the Albert Park Lake just opposite MSAC with the rising sun.

A jogging path around the lake.

So yeah, I reached the exam venue at least two hours earlier than the scheduled time…

That night, we went out to eat at a Japanese restaurant near Flagstaff Gardens. I ate lunch with Estee in the afternoon (Don Don takeaway eaten at the Swanston St campus’ cafe) and she had incidentally talked about the aforementioned Japanese restaurant that her sister had recommended; we didn’t go as we didn’t know where it was located exactly.

Friday, 30 October 2009

Snapped at the end of my final paper for the semester.

That euphoria of being completely free for at least the next two months didn’t hit me when the paper ended. It didn’t please me one bit that I’ve a chance of actually failing any of the paper—god forbid—plus the mental exhaustion of having two long papers in a single day was too strenuous for me.

But I’m finally free now. :)

Saturday, 1st October 2009

At Sandringham Beach, with a 4WD which made its way to the beach and parked itself there. Today was 31C at its peak, glorious, glorious sunshine.

Ivan and his friend, Melvin reached the Sandringham station first, followed by both me and Ethan. At the Southern Cross Station, Estee spotted me (I could barely recognise her as she was dressed up to the nines, and was wearing contacts) and we stopped by to chat—she had just returned from the Derby Cup (preliminary horse-racing tournaments leading to the Melbourne Cup, I presume) and described it as “boring”, although she mentioned little incidents like how the betters would yell at a poor jockey, who would then retaliate, etc.

Ethan and I got on the wrong train—the Pakenham train—when we were supposed to hop on the Sandringham line. I thought it would be fun to just sit it out and see where we ended up at, but at the very last minute, we thought to just switch trains at South Yarra.. and we did just that.

(I also forgot to mention that Ethan and I were supposed to go to the Dandenong Ranges to do a bushwalk organised by one of the CouchSurfers, but we overslept… -_-)

A man by the beach.

A dog going back to the shores.

The same dog running by the beach.

The water was icy cold.. I couldn’t bring myself to jump into the sea in Arctic-like waters. This picture depicts both Melvin and Ethan trying to slowly get into the sea.

A bottle of Ivan’s James Boag.

Ivan drinking said bottle.

The three musketeers who swam in the sea.

Kelvin who arrived later than the four of us, who also brought along his trusty $1000 bicycle.

Kelvin sinked his legs into the sea and when a larger-than-usual wave swept him (or he tripped over something) and he got a little wet himself hahaha.

Coolest. Public toilet. Ever. This is all completely automated, and they have a heat sensor thingy that when pressed, opens/closes the door. A person can only be inside for 10 minutes, and they have soothing music playing inside the loo too wtf. Too bad it was way too sandy and a little dirty since it’s just next to the beach.

Proton car – SIGHTED! It’s very bizarre to see a Victorian number plate on a Malaysian car in Melbourne… and I think this is like the second or third Proton car we’ve ever seen over here.

OH WAIT. We did see a Proton television ad here on national TV HAHAHAHA. So weird to see the Aussies trumpeting the positive aspects of our national car in their local TV… especially since I don’t really fancy Proton all that much.

A drive-thru alcohol centre in Sandringham. It’s always amusing to see things like this.

The first restaurant we went turned out to be under a hotel’s management, and prices were inevitably hotel-like too. We left, walked around a little bit and stumbled onto Sandy Fish & Chips. Even though it took us like 20-30 minutes to get our takeaway (that’s the typical amount of waiting time; it’s a fairly popular place), the food that came was a lot, and as we couldn’t finish the entire thing, had to take it back home.

The interior of Sandy Fish & Chips, although I spent most of my time waiting outside in the cold, freezing my ass off. Funny how when the sun was blocked by the clouds and the wind blew down violently on us, temps dropped to what felt like 10C instantly.

The couple set Ethan and I had hahaha. There were two fishes, tons of fries, two fried dimsims (no, that’s not a typo), and two potato cakes. All for about $12+ IIRC.

As we walked back slowly from Melbourne Central in the horrid cold in just our T-shirts (note to self: ALWAYS bring a jacket even if it’s insane to do so if the temps like 30C-ish during the day—Melbourne has insane weather and climate, so it’s just as well that we’ve to act a little out of the ordinary), we stumbled upon a group of guys talking and laughing rather rowdily, and one of them even made a pass, in a very loud manner, to an Asian girl who was walking by.

Ethan went, “Is that Mike?”. Turns out that it actually was Mike the American who was drunk as hell and dressed in a… schoolgirl’s uniform HAHAHAHA. It was Halloween that night, so we did see a few people in costumes (witches are the most common) walking around. Don’t have a picture of Mike decked out in a skirt, but it was a hilarious sight alright.

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