week 2 Melbourne

1it's almost 1am here and i should probably go to sleep, but since when do i actually sleep when i am supposed to?

another interesting story of my life.
one week before my site engineering class i found out that my class is having a biking trip. i went through the trouble of borrowing a bike from a new friend in Melbourne, but the REAL problem was i can't ride a bike! i tried practicing on the sidewalk and i fell about 20 feet from my village's entrance. blood started gushing out. i limped back to my apartment knowing that i have no first aid kit. i knocked on my neighbor's door for the first time to borrow some bandages. made a hike to 7-11 to get some anti-septic cream and more bandages. at this point, i was so out of it. and it was 2 hours before i have to meet my class at the park for the biking trip. i called my professor and confessed to him that i cannot ride a bike. to my relief, he said that he will assign me to do something else...like hiking. i said thanks!

i took the train to get to the park. i saw a lot of people with their bikes on the train, i figured they were in my class. and they were! so i just ended up following them to the park. luckily, there were 3 guys who didn't bring a bike that day! so i ended up hiking with them. they knew how to ride, but were lazy to bring their bikes. haha. we hiked for 1.5 hours then walked to the nearest train station to go home. the next day, i asked the people who biked....they biked for 3 hours! oh my!!! i would NOT be able to handle that!!

my knee is slowly healing, but who knows how long my scar is going to last. i have a big bruise on my other leg. great!


so onward with other updates.

this semester i'm taking 4 subjects. Advanced Urban Planning & Design. Shaping A Metropolis. Site Engineering. Australia Now. Even though classes started last week, i'm still not sure how classes are going to be like yet. Australia Now is just my fun class where i learn about Australian cultures/sports/history. Site Engineering, i imagine it like my construction class? Shaping a Metropolis is like i learn about urban cityscape. Adv Urban Planning & Design is my studio, we have one project for the semester and that is it! Classes here depend on the LMS blackboards A LOT! i'm not really used to checking every night for updates for classes!

CCF in Melbourne. Cantonese Christian fellowship. a room about 30 canto people fellowshipping. as usual, there was this canto awkward-ness...its the asian culture where we are not really out-going and very introvert-ish. we sang worship songs in chinese! i could barely read the characters...let alone singing and understanding the meaning of it. and the very typical....the songs were slow and people want to sing even slower. we played games for the remaining time, but i just sat there! haha. i made a new friend. unfortunately, i can't go to CCF anymore, cuz my class changed its time which is at the exact time as CCF. boo.

small group with CCCV aka eric and josh's sg on wednesday night. we talked about love/marriage/divorce. we got to some interesting discussions. i really enjoyed them. :) i will definitely try to stick with this small group! but i'm afraid that i might have to do group projects at that time. =\

FIND OUT WHAT'S OPEN! so since joyce and i got to Melbourne and since we realized how pricey everything here is, we have been looking for some cash or casual jobs. Eric, the guy from CCCV, offered us a job as his advertisers for his website. whatsopen.com.au joyce and i had to stand in street corners with stacks of flyers and just bombard people with flyers as they cross for 1.5 hours shifts. 3 times a day for 3 days. $15/hour. easy cash, but it was harder than it sounds. rejections were like stabs in my heart! :( and it was even sadder when i saw flyers on the ground! but we will get our hard-earn cash soon! :) oh the website is pretty cool, it's a search engine and it tells you what is open late at night or 24 hours and where it is in australia. it's pretty handy. except for our night shifts...most people were on their way to go out and didnt have any pockets or they wanted to know RIGHT there what is open, but we didnt have internet access for them. we realized that asians are A LOT more accepting when it comes to flyers. i think it's cuz they think there's something FREE and asians are cheap...so they want free stuff! not to racist, but most white people reject us, but they are usually friendly about it. is it cuz they dont want to hold it in their hands? or they are just trying to environmental friendly? haha.


Moomba festival. this weekend was Melbourne's annual Moomba Festival. it's a waterfest with carnival things all along the Yarra River. since joyce and i have been flyering, we did not get to go until tonight. we purely went for the fireworks and it wasn't pretty. hm yeah. it was worth a seeing though.