While I was still in Form 5, I was offered to study in a public school in Canberra where there is no school fee and also I have an enrolment in a private college in Adelaide. I checked around my class and found that nobody is going to Canberra. The closest will be John Wong and Alex Chieng in Sydney. Alex Tiong, Anthony Lai and Ah Poh is coming to Adelaide. Hence, don't wanted to be left along in Canberra, I came to Adelaide.
My first arrival in Adelaide is sometime on February 1989 before Chinese New Year. Alex's father send us to Singapore and from there onwards we will embark a new journey of our life. We stayed at Golden Landmark hotel. We have a few happy days in Singapore touring and shopping. I remembered when we bought some winter wear, the shop keepers thought that we are from China.
We are received by Anthony's relative in Adelaide. The flight is at night and by the time we arrived, we are all exhausted. We slept for the whole day. The first shopping centre that we visited was Castle Plaza. We searched around for somthing to eat and found everything is so expensive and there was no RM2 Kam Pua mee. A plate of rice with three choices of food will cost $6.00. That's was RM12 at that time. We walked around the shopping centre and found out the cheapest food is barbeque chicken. It costed $4.00 for a whole chicken. So each of us bought one chicken and that's our meal of the day.
After the initial stay, me and Alex parted with Anthony as we studied in different colleges. Alex and I rented a room each in a double storey wooden house at the suburb of Parkside where we could catch a bus to our college at Springfield. Springfield is a very expensive suburb and there is no room to rent there as all the houses are big mansions. We stayed at first floor and our land lady Mrs Fuss live downstair. Sooner we discovered that Mrs Fuss is really fussy. We learned to walk quietly otherwise we will receive a phone call from Mrs Fuss that there are few elephants dancing upstair. We also have to keep the house clean as Mrs Fuss will come anytime for inspection.
Adelaide is the place where I grow up. I learned to cook and shopping whcih was previously my mum job. I also deal with bank and government on all issues concerning my visa and account. I bought my fisrt car and obtianed my first Visa card at the age of 18. In short, I learned to live independently in Adelaide.
This article is an exception as there is no photo. I will update my blog again if I could snap some good photos today.
Saturday, October 20, 2007
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2 comments:
I enjoyed reading your wrtitten post. I would suggest that you may want to write more instead of photos to put in the blog.
During that time, you are one of the few classmates went to overseas to further your study. Now you are at where you were grown up during your uni days. I am sure that you could easyly adopt to their culture and so on in Adelaide.
Although I don't have a chance to study in Australia but i have been to Sydney and Brisbane during my previous trip in 2005 with stephen yii & his wife. It was a great experience and eye opener to us in Sydney. I love Sydney very much and i would come back in future.
To tell you, we didn't know that we were staying at a famous hottest spot with great night activities in Sydney called King Cross while we were in Sydney. We walked through the road and noticed a lot of guys asking us whether we want ladies or not. At that time, we thought that was normal in western country. Until we went back and John Wong told us that the place we stayed was famous for prostitution. Haha...... what a waste...hahahah.....
Hi Heroes,
I have not been to Sydney. The only places that I have to been in Australia is Adelaide, Melbourne and Groote Eylandts where my project is. Darwin is only in transit as we could not directly check in to Groote Eylandts from Adelaide. With the luggage that I have I have to stay in Darwin Airport until the connecting flight to Groote Eylandt.
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