Spring is coming !

I have been in Australia for slightly more than a month already. I won’t say that time flies in this case probably because my daily routine is quite fixed, so it does get a bit bored sometimes and therefore, time passes quite slowly. But I’m a bit shocked to realize that it’s already week 4 of my school semester. Oh no! Work is starting to pile up now and it’s getting closer to the dates of the dreaded tests and assignment deadlines. This reminds me so much of my busy last semester in NYP. Only this time, I don’t have my beloved friends, Cheryl & Rena, to slack till the very last day then rush to do assignments & projects together at the last minute. Really miss the times when we motivate one another via msn on the very night (or rather early morning) the assignment is due. Now, I only have Jeannie & Junting to ‘chiong’ with.



Last Fri, we had a Spore RTs gathering at the house of one of the RT who has come to Sydney to work. We had a really good time. It was a potluck dinner, so there were lots of different kinds of food, eg. Sushi, salad, prawns, baked chicken and curry chicken. Yum yum… esp the curry chicken. Miss curry chicken back home….. But I guess the fun part was really meeting up with fellow Singaporeans and comparing our experiences in Sydney and talking about old times. It always feels so good and heart-warming to meet up with fellow countrymen when you are abroad.



YEAH! It’s 1 Sept tomorrow! It’s the official date when spring starts. Ha… soon, I can wear my T-shirts and don’t have to bring jackets out anymore. And, FLOWERS & more FLOWERS! The flowers in Australia are quite unique and very beautiful. I love them. Now that spring is here, I’ll get to see more and more flowers bloom. Hehe… well, at least I have something to look forward to.



Hmm… talking abt 1 Sept, it suddenly occur to me I only have 3 more months of school left before I can go back to Spore again. Ha! Can’t wait to see my family n friends and eat Spore food! I miss my Cha Kuey Tiao, hainanese chicken rice, carrot cake, mee siam….. and the list goes on.

Pictures from the zoo

The Sydney Opera House & Harbour Bridge view from the zoo

Wombat

Piggy

Another week has passed again. Well, here are the highlights of the past week.





1. I went to the Taronga Zoo at the northern part of Sydney on fri with some of my RT classmates. Have to take the ferry from Circular Quay to the zoo. The zoo is quite interestingly situated. The whole zoo is on a slope. So from the ferry terminal, we took the sky safari (which is just cable car in normal, boring terms) up to the peak of the slope and entered the zoo from there. Then we walked around the zoo, which runs downwards and around the slope, before going back to the top of the slope again to take the sky safari down to the ferry terminal. The whole zoo is quite big (we took a whole day to explore the zoo and have not finish seeing all the animals by the time we left) and there were a lot of native animals there. Haha.. n I decided, my favourite Australian animal is the wombat. They are so cute and fat. It makes me want to carry them and hug and squeeze them. Unfortunately, the zoo only has 1 animal show running and that’s the bird show. And even then, it lasted only abt 8 mins and the birds didn’t really perform many tricks. So sad… Cos I love watching animals shows. Oh! but at the place where the bird show took place, there was a very magnificent view of Sydney harbour, the Harbour and the Opera House. So if anyone is interested in taking good pictures of both the bridge and the opera house together, the zoo is a good place to visit.



2. I went for my 1st aikido training in Sydney on Sat morning. Wow! They really maximize the training time over here. Training was almost non-stop for the whole 1 and a half hr (except when the sensei was demonstrating). And we did a move where the uke has to run to catch the nage’s hand. The person I did with was quite big sized. He tengkang once, I have to run a very big round to attempt to catch his hand. And it didn’t help that he was a black belt and was turning very fast and intentionally wanted to torture me (in a good-natured way). Hei… Haven ran so much for a long time already. Then we did moves that involves lots of rolls as well. Needless to say, we were rolling non-stop again. Had to be thrown and roll even before I have time to catch my breath from the last roll. Think over the 30 min we were doing those moves, I may have rolled close to 50 times. Weapon training was quite fun too. Learned a lot abt the proper way to hold and raise the boken and move with the boken. Interesting! Overall, despite having many blue-blacks, I enjoyed the training a lot. I intend to go for the Thurs night as well as Sat morn training from now on. Must not be lazy anymore!!! I’m growing fat from all the chips, chocolates, milk and lots of other food here.



3. Went to Paramatta for shopping on Sat afternoon. The shopping centre is huge! Lots of sales going on too (esp winter clearance sales). Haiz.. but me, being not very rich, could only buy 2 tank tops and a light jacket. Hehe… but I’m quite happy. Retail therapy does work…



School starts again tomorrow. Haiz… Why does the weekend always seem to fly past so quickly?

Surprise, surprise!

I went for my first aikido session in Sydney yesterday morning. It was at the Sydney Olympic Park. I didn’t join in for the session, partly because I have not received my gi from spore and partly cos I wanted to familiarize myself with the Australian style of aikido before I joined in. Hmm… abt aikido 1st, it was quite different from the training sessions in spore. Oz seems to focus a lot on “ki” and meditation, the basic skills for weapon training and they really take their training very seriously by training non stop throughout the whole session. Overall, I found their training session quite interesting but I need to adjust some of my techniques and mindsets to fit their style of training. Can’t wait to start my training. I miss aikido!!!



Here comes the big surprise. I met one of my aikido friend (Lian Jie) from ZQS during the training session on sat. I was shocked beyond words to see her. So shocked till I had to blink a few times before I was sure that I was not seeing things and could call out to her. I mean, never in my life would I expect to meet my fellow classmate in Sydney, not to mention in so ‘ulu’ a place as the dojo. But it was a very pleasant surprise. It’s always v nice and heart-warming to meet fellow Singaporeans in a foreign land, esp if u happen to know the person in spore. It turned out that Lian Jie was in Sydney for business and she wanted to continue her training while she’s in Sydney, so there she was. After the training session, we made plans to meet up on Sunday.



So today, we went out together in the afternoon to Manly beach. I would imagine that the beach is a very nice place to hang out in summer. But now being winter, the place was quite quiet and it was quite cold to walk along the beach. However, we had some fun watching some brave young lads wave surfing in the cold waters. After that, we went to a nice Italian restaurant at The Rocks for dinner. The entrée was very delicious and well made. The pasta was well-done too. Then we went to Pancakes on The Rocks for desert. Had 1 chocolate & 1 butter pancake with 2 scoops of ice cream. The chocolate pancake was yummy. It really melts in the mouth. The butter pancake was normal but went very well with the ice-cream. Lian Jie was very nice and treated me at both places. I had a great day. Good scenery, nice ambience, enjoyable company, fantastic food.



School starts again tomorrow. Hope it’ll be a good week.

Yummy steamboat dinner

Today was a very enjoyable day. I had a huge steamboat dinner! My landladies treated Jeannie and I as a form of welcome to their place. Had great fun as we were laughing throughout the whole dinner and of course, it was fantastic to get to eat all the yummy yummy food. We went to Burwood & Ashfield to get all the food with Grace today. There were prawns, 3 different kinds of mushrooms, cuttlefish balls, curry-filled balls (which were v delicious btw), meat, vegetables, luncheon meat, crab sticks, etc etc. And the soup base was Ma La soup base. So delicious and cos it’s so cold (these few days have been ultimate cold! Weather report says that the temp tonight will be 0 to -1 deg), it was so nice to crowd around the hot pot. Really feel fortunate to get such good and warm landladies.



By the way, I made the mistake of counting my eggs before they hatch. I have to go to school 4 days a week instead of 3. It’s a long n unhappy story, which I choose to forget, so shall not recount it here. Oh… but I was right about one thing. There are lots n lots of assignments and group project work and exams. Boo hoo hoo…… Uni life is not that fun after all.

Happy Birthday Singapore!

Started school today. Only have a 2 hr lecture every Monday. Hehe… not too bad. Should not have Monday blues now. And after examining my timetable, I realize that I only have to go to school on 3 days every week. Mon to Wed. So that leaves Thur to Sun free. Hmm.. and let me do some maths here. I go to school 3 days a week. I have 16 weeks of lessons per sem. So that means theoretically, I only go to school 48 days this sem. Haha… sounds cool! I’m starting to like uni life. Just hope there won’t be too much projects, assignments, presentations etc. But I got a feeling there will be. Haiz… maybe I don’t really like uni life so much afterall. BUT, now is only the beginning, so I shall not make judgments so soon. Shall wait and see…



Tomorrow is national day. HAPPY 40th BIRTHDAY, SINGAPORE!!! I miss singing all the national day songs & watching the fireworks. I miss home…

Happenings over the week

I have really fully settled down in my Aussie apartment. Bought all the necessary things needed to make this place home. Settling in is really a new experience. Before this, I can never imagine the amount of things that I’ll need to buy when I get here. Things like soy sauce, salt & pepper (cooking things), toilet brush, detergents right up to containers for holding the plate washing sponge and powder detergents used to be taken for granted back home cos all these things were always available but now we really had to shop and buy all these absolutely necessary things to make our place fit to be called home. It doesn’t really help that I’m on a tight budget, therefore have to go to several places to look for the best price for all these things before deciding to buy them. As a result, the few days of settling in were really busy n tiring days of walking, more walking and carrying of all the stuff back and more carrying. I really thank my stars that our place is fully furnished with sofa, washing machine, pots and pans etc. Cannot imagine having to buy and move all these back home. But on the positive side, I really believe that my calf muscle and arm muscles will be very much tougher by the time I get back to Spore.



Went to Hunter Valley from Thur to Sat. (Hunter Valley is a place that produces lots & lots of wine) It’s quite pretty there. Very different from Sydney city. Lots of open spaces, fields and vast vineyards there. We stayed in the YHA Wine Country Lodge. Quite comfy & nice. (I highly recommend anyone who wants to go on a budget tour to stay in YHAs. I stayed in 3 YHAs in Aust before already and all of them are very nice and clean. Really value for money.) The tour I joined included a half day tour to wineries and wine tasting. Tasted quite a few wines for the 1st time in my life. Hmmm… Think I dun really fancy wines. Red wine is esp awful. Spicy & piercing to the tongue, palate and throat. Those that I like are the sweet/desert wine. Haha.. But that really defeats the purpose of drinking wine rite? I might as well drink soft drinks. But it was a worthwhile experience. At least I tasted a lot of variety of wines and I know a bit about how they were made and what kind is suited to go with the different cuisines. Had a self-made wood fire pizza for dinner one of the nite at the lodge. Yum yum...



On my last day at Hunter Valley, Jeannie and I visited the Hunter Valley Gardens. It was beautiful! 16 hectares of land with 13 different kinds of garden (eg Oriental, Indian, Italian styles) all in 1 area. My favorite was Storybook Garden where they were many statues of storybook characters with many nice flowers. The whole place is very colourful and pretty. Too bad, it’s winter now. Many flowers are not in bloom, eg the roses. However, Jeannie and I have already made up our minds. We shall visit the place again in summer to see all the flowers in bloom. Can’t wait till summer. Oh… the thing that I shall remember most about my trip to Hunter Valley is the cold weather. It was really much much colder at Hunter Valley than in Sydney. The temp dropped to 3 degrees Celsius at night. During my 3 days at Hunter Valley, my hands and feet were constantly numb with cold. Wearing gloves and socks didn’t help at all. It was so bad till I couldn’t even feel anything with my fingers. They felt like they didn’t belong to me! But other than that, I should say that I really enjoyed Hunter Valley. It was a nice break before school starts.



This morning, it was back to reality again. Back to being an aunty. Walked 50 min to Auburn to buy groceries and other stuff and lugged tones of things back. (bought an enormous cabbage that must have weighed at least 4kg!) Haizz… Tired tired…

And school starts tomorrow! Why is it that I’m already looking forward to the next holidays? Haha…