Flinders Medical Centre main entrance. This is also where i take the Flinders Loop bus to school everyday. Takes 4 minutes to get from here to the main plaza. Buses from here also take 15 minutes to get to Marion, a huge vivo-city like shopping centre with Coles, Big W, Woolworths ect and ~45 minutes to Adelaide City, central market.

Quite frequently, i can hear and see helicopters flying towards and away from FMC to do air rescue. According to Joy, when it flies over where i live, the walls will rattle!

View of the main campus from the Biological Science building. As you can see, it is like studying inside a park, trees, bushes everywhere. There are many ducks and birds around too which are not afraid of people.
I was just sitting by the lakeside eating my packed sandwich lunch enjoying the view above when this bird jumped up from the fronds near the lake and approached me. It came so close i immediately grabbed my bag next to me, for fear it would start scavenging in my bag for food. It simply stood there and looked at me, and went away after a few minutes when i did not offer it any food.

Anchor Court, which is in between Physical and Biological Science Building. Must climb up a tiring flight of stairs to reach here. People like to just sit/lie on the grass here to bask in the sun/ eat lunch. Its like having a picnic everyday! =D


Fried Spinach and fish fingers with a bowl of rice. First attempt at something different. There were actually 3 fish fingers but i ate one to see if it was cooked. First fry garlic and onions then put in vege and pour water, soy sauce and sugar in. Close lid and wait until all the vege is soft and limp. Tasted good!
Joy and Andrew, my landlords, invited me over to their place for tea (dinner). I made a bowl of fruit salad and brought it over with me. Andrew kept saying it was delicious! Made of watermelon cubes, orange cubes and banana cubes mixed in passionfruit yogurt and topped with almonds and raisins.

Attended 4 50 minutes long lectures today on Reading and Writing at Uni, Referencing and Plagiarism, Life at Uni and Critical Thinking. Only dozed off a bit during the sessions after lunch. There is a Writing Centre in school where you can bring your essays to and the staff there will help to proof read it/ made sure you answered the question/ tell you how you can improve on it ect for free. Sounds like asking your teachers to pre-grade your paper first, i am definitely going to try it!

Hi world! Welcome to my humble abode!

Today is my 6th day in Aus and 3rd day alone here. Im trying not to come online so much because i dont have alot of GB to spend. I mistakenly added a $100A vodafone recharge voucher worth 6GB to my oz handphone so now i have 650 free vodafone to vodafone minutes, $100 worth of flexible usage value, 500 free sms and 180 free talk time to spend before 21st April. So far i have been calling M1 (and M3) at least twice a day. Skyped with M1 and M3 when TP was still around!

Learnt alot about myself during these few days. I am quite particular about cleanliness. I came up with house rules and established a system for clothes/ stationery/ food ect. I suppose this is because i live alone and i have full control over how i want the place to look/ feel. I am also kind of a health junkie, been cooking alot of veg and boiling everything. Havent fried or used any oil/ salt yet in my cooking. I eat minimal meat except for a few sausages because meat is too messy to deal with. Swept and mopped the floor today and washed the toilet and kitchen too.

The weather here is swelteringly hot! It could actually penetrate through my jeans and burn my legs, feels like being in Antartic or something where the UV rays are deadly without the ozone protection lol.

As i only got internet connection, i physically wrote down a diary for the 1st 4 days. Read it if you like haha, but its really long as i just wanted to record down in detail what i did/ate/spent/felt ect during the first few days.
Warning: long essays ahead.I think sending people off is much harder than going off myself. Thats because i know that the person is going off for an adventure in a foreign country and i worry about the safety/health ect of the person. Going off myself is another thing as i am about to embark on a new journey and the excitement kind of outweighs the sadness of departing. I guess thats why i felt more sad when M1 and M3 left compared to going off myself.

I was also extremely sad when TP left for home, so that reinforces my point.


Thank you for everyone for coming to send me off! Thanks also for all the letter/photos/gifts! Fiesties, i have your pictures up on my fridge door. The fridge is now a happy corner, as it is full of happy memories and food. Thanks for the cookbook too, i havent actually tried the recipes yet and am just cooking based on my instincts now as i want to know how good a cook i am. So far, it doesnt seem like i am going to be the female version of jamie olliver.

First pot of rice, slightly too watery but fluffy and well cooked.

My first few meals were decent because they were really basic.

Lunch 1 above- microwaved mixed veg and over-boiled sausages.

Dinner 1- corn, tomato, celery and sausage soup with rice. delicious soup!

Dinner 2
(sushi given by kind singaporean family i met and who live nearby my place). same soup as dinner 1 but changed corn to carrot.

Dinner 3 (Today)
First try at porridge! Whole meal took an hour and a half to cook, because the rice took so long to soften, also the pot kept boiling over so i just turned the heat off then on then off and on again.


The pot ended up with a thick layer of burnt rice at the bottom. It is still in my sink, soaking in water because i just cant get all of it off. Taste wise was alright because the ingredients were mostly the same. For every meal I just play around with different combination of celery, corn, tomato, carrots and sausages for protein and boil them together in a pot.

After eating dinner i watched 2 episodes of Glee:) happily leaving my dishes and everything else in the kitchen tabletop. Big mistake, because when the show ended, to my horror i found a whole army of ants all over the kitchen!

Check out the ant trail leading all the way to the window sill. Ants in Oz are fatter and blacker than the Sg ones. They are also more efficient, once food is left out for ~30 minutes, they descend in hoards!

Experienced all kinds of wildlife today, earlier on in the day i found a huge spider in my shower area.
It had legs maybe 8 cm long and moved very quickly. My first instinct when i saw it was to grab my camera and snap a shot of it.

It was a hard decision to make, whether to kill it or now, but i decided not to in the end, it being the first huge spider i encountered. I captured it and threw it out of the house on a grass patch.

The campus is really huge, it has 4 main parts- Flinders Medical Centre, Sturt Campus, North Ridge and South Ridge. This is the lake which is central to North and South Ridge. The campus is sprawling over a hill so it is really tiring to get from place to place, i used to think i could walk from home to lectures, but now i think i will take the free loop bus. Luckily, i live very close to FMC and there is a busstop right in front of it. Not too impressed with the architecture of the buildings in campus, just really standard modern buildings, no old fashioned red-bricked feel to it.

Friends wise, im slowly building up my friends network. Just in case i forget their names. Amy- 1st yr nursing student, met at bus stop. Joyce & Claudia- Sg sisters staying at 35 Malcom, met during campus tour. Hashi- tour guide for North ridge tour. Shaz- course mate, stays near Marion. Other course mates i met during our course orientation- Tim 1 and 2, Li, Kathy, Abbie, Thu, Holly, Bookie?, Paul, Grace. Paul lives opposite me 4 Milton St. The 25 other people doing my course were all really friendly and funny people, the lecturers and course coordinators looked and sounded like they were the supportive type so thats good too.

I think in some way my wish came through. I came to Flinders without knowing anyone at all and went to orientation alone too. (Orientation in Flinders is not like Sg where we have groups and arranged activities and all, its just booths around and tours/ information lectures which start hourly so you just wander around and go for these activities, because of this i was so worried about being alone throughout). At the end of my first tour though, i got to know Joyce and Claudia, Sg sisters who were here with their parents. They taught me how to buy bus tickets and how to get to the nearby shopping mall Marions, so i had company during day 1. Their parents were very kind to me too, offering to carry my stuff, buying dinner for me ect.

Alright, that was a long post! Will blog more next time!

Oh! My contact details:

Address:
3A Milton Street
Bedford Park
SA 5042
Australia

I have my very own mail box which looks quite cute, send me something and i will be delighted!

Skype: ting.margaret

Hp: 0449058925

Hi World!

Hi world!

This blog was set up to record and document my journey into 2 new beginnings of my life:

1) staying overseas by myself and

2) studying medicine*

I do not want this new part of my life to fly by me without me remembering much of the experience and hence i hope to faithfully blog at least once a week to capture the moments for future remembrance.

My journey into Oz (I feel tempted to type 'Aus' all the time, but 'Oz' is the Australian slang while 'Aus' is just a shortform. I figured i will use the more authentic form.) will start on 18th February 2010 when i arrive in Adelaide airport with my father.

I am still in Singapore and it is 8.49am now, i normally do not wake up so early in the morning, but today is an exception. I just finished registering in all my classes for Sem 1 and Sem 2. Extra places in the classes just opened up at 10am Oz time (7.30 Sg time).

Here is how my timetable looks like:

Although it does not seem very packed, my main concern is rushing from class to class and being late for them as the Flinders campus is huge. You will also notice that i have ambitiously registered for many 9am classes. This is a show of my resolution to keep to a healthy lifestyle while i am in Oz. I will sleep early and wake up early and eat healthily too.

*More about my course. I will be studying Bachelor of Clinical Science/ Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery. It is a year 12 Pathway to Medicine and on top of it being launched for the first time in 2010, only 25 domestic places are offered each year. This is one of the reasons why i decided to study this course, as it does seem like a very precious spot.

It is a 6 years course and i will be studying Clinical Science during my first 2 years. If i pass all my modules and get a GPA of >5, i will gain automatic admission to the MBBS component, joining the rest of the graduate entry students.

Like in IP, i will be in the pioneer batch again! I see many similarities to IP like being in a small cohort, being part of the pioneers, having to join in the bigger, mainstream cohort after 2 years. And just like how i skipped the O levels, i will skip taking the GMSAT and getting interviewed by the medicine admission panel.

Thanks to my Jiu Jiu's friends, i managed to secure a bed sitter for myself which is very near to the FMC. I am excited to see it and excited about staying in a fully furnished flat by myself. It seems like there is a TV and even a DVD player in the flat, so i feel quite worried now that i will spend too much time watching TV and neglect my studies or neglect to make friends outside. But i suppose it should not pose too big a problem as i have similarly survived well in Singapore with TV and various distractions. Self-disciplince Marg!

Alright, signing off now to continue my sleep. Bye!