Like most of the overseas students, who needed to take care of most of their daily life themselves, I have to decide many stuffs to make life easier.
Washing clothes, tidy up my room and preparing meals filled up most of the week's schedules, while squeezing time to study to get through the hard final subjects.
In this post I would like to share something in preparing meals, one of the most frustrating thing I need to deal with everyday. I maybe better that the others have, as mostly I only have to prepare dinner while I have most of my lunch time at uni's canteen. I know that some people prepares both lunch and dinner themselves, as because they either wanna to save money and to avoid to put those even-the-same and not-so-good tasted canteen food in their mouth. But I think I'm really hard to archive that coz' there's already not much time for me and I'm already get frustrated from cooking.
But so why not to have dinner at uni? As I've mentioned, uni's meals is just-right, it's always the same stuffs you're going to eat and it's not very good taste, even the price is actually quite expensive when comparing with McDonald's: it meals costs about 6 bucks and you can get the meal with drinks; but for the uni's you pay the same price but have NO DRINKS and SMALLER SIZED MEALS!!
Normally everyday in the week except Wednesdays I'll cook the dinner for myself and I'll buy uni's meals for dinner only on Wed, that's just because I've to school until 5 on that day only.
If I really don't wanna to cook on certain days, then I will go to the nearby Subway to buy it's subs for dinner. (I loved Subway very much!)
I goes to the supermarket every Saturday or Tuesday (off school days) and think hard to find out what to cook with least effort, that is, the stuffs that are easiest to prepare and cook. Often I will cook pasta for weekdays and steak for weekends, and sometimes do some "stir-fry" Chinese dishes (which is always with either beef or chicken and some veggies).
I seldom cook seafood as most seafood found in the supermarkets are frozen and thus NOT FRESH. Right until last Saturday when I visited a local supermarket Coles I discovered that there has small section within the meats display is selling fresh-looked seafood. I am so excited to see that through it only offering a limited range of seafood. I've then bought some garlic prawns off there.
One interesting thing I found during day in the supermarket is that I found some food products are actually produced from Hong Kong - not on the Asian food aisle. This including Soya bean milk and Doll (公仔) frozen foods.
The process of making a dinner is frustrating for me because I have to firstly prepare the raw foods, cut them (if needed), prepare the rice or pasta, and cook them, and I've to wash everything afterwards. I am really remembering the times when my mum prepares the meals for me, umm...
So as I mentioned, this week I will have fresh prawns and also skewers of chicken, with Greek salad for my nights' dinner.
Maybe sometime in the future I will share some of my dinner recipes in my website.
Last Friday, I heard the news that there would a new share-mate coming to join me (in another room) from the owner.
There was actually another share-mate stayed here, but after a heated argument between him and the owner, among a number of misunderstanding for some very little, common-sensable stuffs, he had left and there was only me stayin here... until now.
I was quite worried during the time whether I will the only one to stay here or not, as the uni has commenced and most students should found there home at this time, there was a little hope for anyone to find here. The owner also proved this by saying that after that guy "wasted" a week here, just seemed like harder to find students to rent here.
So when I knew that someone will be joining me here, I was quite excited and started guessing who's that. Will he be someone from Hong Kong? Will he/she is from the West?
Finally it's unveiled "he" is a guy from Mainland China who appears just started uni here. Hopefully we will live well together without much arguments.
But I bet my boredom here will change not-so-much, as he's from China (do not treat this as discrimination men!), and I'm quite Western minded, I guess I really don't have any common interests with him.
Just giving you guys an update what's happened so far...
So it is going to be the third week since I started school again.
The works seem still fine for me so far, not much really hard to do. One thing is getting close is that I need to hand in the first part of my assignment next week. Through it's a group assignment but it still could be hard for us and I have had done a little so far.
One subject deemed to be easy for me as the only assignment students need to do for that is creating a website. Maybe because I'm quite proficient on writing webpages, I really don't feel any pressure on that yet.
I've met some of my friends again but I still not willing to go out with them yet.
About my home, there was quite scary on something happened on one night last week. When I going to prepare for my dinner, I didn't notice anything different in the kitchen right until... I discovered that there was a COCKROACH crawling along the wall! Since I'm quite frightened by the cockroach, I did not know what should I do to get it away or kill it. I tried to throw something and shooting rubber bands to it (hoping it go away), until I asked the owner to borrow cockroach spray and spray on it. Then to ensure it's dead, I poured some boiled water to it to send to direct to hell!
That was very scary to me and at last I didn't have so much mood to cook and eat my dinner!
To avoid such things happen again, I bought my own spray and some cockroach baits to do a "revenge", amazingly, there has no more cockroaches to appear to date!
Let's hope this will continue and I will give you the next bulletin next week.
I'm just back to Australia and moved to a new residence nearly for week. I've moved away from my old residence that has a stunning ocean view (hope you can remember if you've keep checked out my old site!), and now moved to a sharehouse that owns by a Hong Kong family.
It was quite frustrating when I move as I've got so much stuffs! It's almost 20 cartons for my stuffs! Luckily, is that, this time my dad also comes with me as he's got two weeks holiday off work, and therefore he helped me to pack all things up and move.
The sharehouse now I am stayin' totally has three rooms for students, each room similar in size and all shares the toilet, bathroom and kitchen. Everything here is quite okay for me except the kitchen maybe a bit dirty as cockroaches can be seen sometimes, and we only have a small electronic heat plate to cook. But these are not really the fact makes me not 100% like here as that can make me spend more time on study.
The real fact is that the owner's family has a young daughter (less than 10 yrs old), she was quite annoying with me on the first three days here. She often came to my room asking to play with and kept jumping on my bed! Thankfully on the recent two days she seems to be less energetic and seldom see her knocking the door. Otherwise I guess I won't have much quiet time to study unless stayin at uni!
For my studies, I started my first week for this semester (actually this should be my last semester for my degree, hopefully I could pass all subjects and graduate!). It's not much to learn this week, it's all about introduction.
The subjects now I'm studying are seem more critical and realistic than the ones I've gone through before. One subject requires students to do a 3000 words group report (IN GROUPS thankfully!) plus each student need to manage a hotel simulated to run in real world throughout the semester. Students have to make critical decision for that hotel for it to gain profit as we need to run it like a real hotel.
Hope this will be gone through without too much hassle...
Good luck for everyone!
the COL blog - Chris Lam's personal, diary-style blog for all things that Chris explores everyday. These are the stuffs that just can't be fitted into his formal personal website - ChrisOn-Line.net. Checkout here to see Chris exposing more about what he sees from time to time.
