Star Wars Symphony

Pretty priceless, had to share this one!

Cobain Street

Nevermind?

Otherwise, was pretty grateful to have my friends prepare a fantabulous meal for this greedy boy's consumption. Some nicely soya-drenched chicken wings, fried dace in black bean sauce with pumpkin, ginseng soup with pork ribs, and stir-fried cucumbers make up a great meal with 4 friends from China, 3 from Canton, and 1 from Anhui.

Lucky man.

You know you are a lucky man when, you have housemates who are have the most excellent gastranomically creative abilities. Check out the home-made pasta with most tasty lamb rack.



And when they provide you with a cat to be the guardian of my "Pi Pa Gao".



Blessed indeed, =)

the Feryl librarian

The Salvos (The Salvation Army) have always been kind to me, providing me with el cheapo supplies, furniture and clothing throughout the years. So, after walking in and out the store near my place a coupla' times, I decided to give back. I volunteered! Thursdays 11am to 2pm I'll be the resident librarian at the Salvo's store.

And here're the pics! Bob the librarian. Check out my domain! Neat eh, that's 3 hours of shelving and neatening worth of work.



The people there are most kind, they gave me a gift of a pair of navy blue trousers as my uniform, and 50% off some books I wanted to get.

Domestication at new peaks

So. No school today, and of all things to do, I decide to cook in with my pal Ryan from Sichuan after a long day out in Clayton town procuring groceries. Haha, procure. Yes, it's serious business.

So, here's the deal. I made spicey beef soup with heaps of veg, cauliflower, carrots, potatos, diced beef strips and pork/chive dumplings. Also on the menu was fried omlette with minced pork, long beans, and mushrooms - my speciality.



And yes, that's Gui Ling Gao in a can. Always good to have. =)

Thank you!

Much thanks, salutations and cheer for your kind support.

Leap and the net will appear!
Bob

A day in the life

Wander-o-meter
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Wandering levels - *** (looking a lot better)
Domestication levels - *
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A day in the life.

"Woke up, got out of bed, dragged a comb across my head" The Beatles, 1967.

Whilst my wandering is nowhere as exciting and super-surreal as that song, here's a little recollection of how my day went.


Dragging myself to school/class in the city. A 45-minute train-ride away. Depending if I board the all-stops train or the express train. The Sun was out today, so it was pretty pleasant.


Class lasted all of two hours, and nothing noteworthy happened there. Class was packed to the brim, I reckon there were probably 25 of us in a room meant for 15. Did not quite feel conducive for learning at all. Class came and went, and I wandered into the city. Chanced upon this - Mingary, it got my attention, as it rang of my Chinese name, Ming. Turned out to be a all-access sanctuary in the middle of town, anyone could go in anytime, to just close-out and medititate. Nice.


I then took some time to hide away in the State Library and give in to my Singaporeanity. I started on a assignment due in Week 4, and Week 2 had just started. It took a while to rev up the engines but I managed to get 500 out of the 2000 words done. All this while imagining Bach's Air as I soaked in the grandeur of the place. I apologise my photos don't do a fair job of immortalising the place - it's not the best camera-phone I'm using.


The day couldn't have ended better. Made a random call to Wes, the brother and bassist and amazingly it got through. He had returned from Singapore. Now with the partner in crime in place, Melbourne suddenly looks a whole lot more promising. Woohoo! The only problem is gee whiz, we're living miles apart. It took him 45min to send me home by car!

The State Library

Have always been a great fan of libraries, from the big and small from the high-tech to the grand. Spending so many years at RP meant that my library experience was one of technology, clearly cut lines, fast moves and space 2010. The State Library of Victoria on the other hand is a work of grandeur, massive use/waste of space, and deep silent learning. The Director of my faculty brought us around for this one, and I felt infinitely like a tourist. Located right smack in the city on Melbourne City's main street, Swanston, it brought back feelings of 'home' - RMIT, where I did my undergrad studies stood right opposite.




There were two pre-dominant groups being brought on group tours around the library - a bunch of young high-school students and use, a group of 15 postgraduate students. It was funny whenever we crossed paths. =)

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In other news, I woke up to the Smurfs, housemates had cunningly procured a DVD from somewhere and we were all subjected to a good whole episode of it whilst having breakfast. It was cool recalling grumpy smurf, who hated everything.

Emergency Shrek Bulletin'

Nuff' said.

Wander-o-meter
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Wandering levels - *
Domestication levels - ******* over the roof.
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The Prata man can.

So, my prata empire adventures have been solidly worked on with tonnes of actual legwork/research. By scouring the lands for the cheapest and best pratas, I have found the best prata available in the Clayton precinct (I loathe to use this term, my colleagues from Sonic Arts in RP can testify to this), and it's darn cheap, and pretty decent.




Only $1.50 for a plain and $2.00 for an egg prata. Add a $2.00 chicken curry with drumstick, I had a pretty good deal. By far the cheapest, on average, pratas in this precinct (ahem) hover around $4. In the city, they go up to $8. And best of all, there was an actual authentic prata flipper, behind a glass shield. And there is option for murtabak. Run by a Singaporean family that migrated to Australia 9 years ago, I was glad to make my first prata flipper aquaintance - Uncle Latiff and family.

Great choice!

Wander-o-meter
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Wandering levels - ** (wandered around the neighbourhood and found myself a chair for the backyard)
Domestication levels - ***** (again, still staying indoors 90% of the day and cooking)
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Great choice? $159 for a monopoly set. =)

It's the weekend, and I made cabonara for myself today. Not too shabby, just a lil' salty. Too much magarine on the onset I suppose.



It was pretty yummy. I'll definitely do it again. But this time with some real bacon. I substituted with my soon-to-run-out luncheon meat supply.

The unbearable need for soup

Wander-o-meter
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Wandering levels - *
Domestication level - ****
---

Soup, is a liquid food prepared with loving care, devotion and a heck lot of patience. Well, unless you posses a pressure cooker. But I know they didn't. And I saw it with my own eyes. So the wanderer is a happy boy.



Had soup for the first time here! A friend from Canton was kind enough to invite me over for dinner and boy the food was tasty. The Cantonese are famed for their prowess in the kitchen and soup and this did everything to substantiate that belief.

On the menu was - Corn and carrot soup, minced meat with corn in some uber tasty salty sauce, braised, i think, chicken wings/drumlets and a supremely tasty bamboo shoots vegetable dish.

Over-dinner conversation proved to be an interesting affair, the SIngaporean thinking in English and working overtime to translate to Mandarin, and she (and her two other friends from China too) mentally deciphering my poor mandarin, and then translating to English. It was also pretty cool that we were all teachers (all 3 of them are studying for a Masters in Education), so it was nice to hear the academic terms I was familiar with being uttered in very beautiful Chinese. Managed to learn how to say "essay, review, papers and thesis" in Chinese. Beat that!

Friends are friends are friends from all places

"I am walking till I meet the sun and along the way I find fellow travellers."

The world is quickly opening but yet again, I have been finding it hard to make aussie friends. I have simply not have had any chance to! The international student population here's overwhelming. According to Monash stats, 31% of the 55,000 students are from overseas. Well, not too worried as I made fast friends with a translator from Mexico and a biomedical engineer with Anhui, a part of China I knew little about.

The Mexican shared with me much about how the aussie accents just were impossible to catch. Her experience with the British and the Americans gave her little preparations for the extensive heyysss and neusss here. It was so bad she lost her way because she couldn't quite get the bus drivers local lexicon/slangs. She wasn't all the most impressed with the lovely people running the school either, they somehow got Mexico and Argentina mixed up and sent all her pre-flight to Melbourne documents to Argentina. Amazing.

The Chinese chap actually commented my Chinese was good! Now that's a feat, but also a measure of how often I've been speaking Mandarin here and its results. We waxed lyrical about the myths and legends of ancient China and I've found someone to confirm which Hong Kong kungfu/martial arts flicks are actually based on facts. He painted a vivid picture of Huang Shan, "Yellow Mountain"reputed the best of the five legendary peaks of China. What compelled me were the strength of his descriptors in Chinese. Man I wish I could speak like him. I'll get back to you guys when I figure out exactly how I could translate all that to English.



Also, had nasi lemak for lunch with my buddy from Sichuan, China at my housemate's restaurant ** See above - Malaysia Garden Restaurant (where the waitresses have to wear kebayas). Relations here just take on brand new meanings, as every friendship made is as important as relations back home.

All in all, a wonderful day.

Pixar | 20 years of animation

Had the pleasure of braving the downtown rain after class to check out Pixar's showcase at the Australian Centre for Moving Images (ACMI) - felt good to be a student again, had a $5 concession off the ticket prices. Woohoo. Went in and was blown away. Couldn't quite take photos inside, so here's some from the outside.




What was particularly interesting, apart from all the mind expanding quotes and artwork from the good people there, was the Zoetrope. Check this out!

And my thoughts for the day? "Attending library workshops is really an important thing to do. Especially at postgrad level." =) And I did just that.

The amazing cost of living here

My grand plans of enrolling in a university with a seriously sprawling campus have been reduced to this...



Promise of a grand faculty has been swapped for a conference room in the city's Collins Street, why do I feel so cheated? =) Politics, they say, is the reason behind having classes in the city and not on campus. And the city, is yes, $9.90 away from home, and probably an hour's worth of travel.

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Also on the radar...

It's been a while since I've been here, and I'm quite quickly reminded to the rising costs of living on this behemoth of an island.

Just today I spent
$9.90 - Daily train/tram ticket to get to school
$13.50 - Cheap As phone I picked up from a Chinese discount store
$3.95 - For a telephone extension cable
$2.00 - For a telephone multi-adaptor
$5.45 - Cheap As McDonald's happy meal for lunch
$9.45 - for 5 stamps for regular postage back to Singapore

The train ticket just killed me. That's $13SGD to get from Pasir Ris to Jurong.

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Lastly, this country is crazy over Shrek.

Japanese dinner

Thing about Melbourne is, most Japanese diners are inconceivably run by Chinese. So I was skeptical when I walked past this joint (in Clayton town) on a number of occassions. "Jyu Jyu" it's called, and the signboard says they're famed for their sushi rolls. With my new found buddy from Sichuan, Ryan in tow, we bravely ventured in. But that's only because the nearby Malaysia Garden restuarant was closed (they close Mondays). And lo and behold - Authentic Japanese matronly chef and wait staff. And, with a kitchen that took up more than half of the floorspace, they had to be serious about the food.






I evidentally enjoyed my dinner very much - they took 20minutes to prepare my bento set consisting gyoza and teriyaki chicken which was massively tender. And it cost all of $7 flat. Not too shabby. Will definitely return. After all, it's "my favourite Japanese restaurant" as their banner suggests.