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Hi all! In this series of blogs I will share my experiences of my time living in Australia. For those who don't know, I lived in Brisbane, Australia - also the hometown of mOOnGLaDe - for three years until 2009 while getting my honours degree in finance at the University of Queensland. I absolutely enjoyed my time there and soooo wish I could one day go back and live there, maybe in 30 years when I'm retired! This series of blogs will be me fondly reminiscing on my time spent along with some social commentary on the differences in culture and lifestyles. Perhaps anyone thinking of going to Australia to study or people interested in the differences in our cultures will find this interesting.

Part 1: Beginning University Life

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Life at UQ

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First thing that stood out was how beautiful the St Lucia Campus is! It looks just like the pictures / broaches given out. The architecture had an rustic old charm about it and it is common to see couples take their wedding photos there on weekends. Overall it created such a welcoming and relaxing vibe like what you see in TV school movies, a fun and relaxing place to learn. It was refreshing in contrast to my last "pre-u" education i had at Ngee Ann Poly back in Singapore that felt more like an "institution". That school felt really industrial and serious kinda like the school bought over an old abandoned factory and converted it into a school churning out assembly line graduates one after the other. There was no warmth!

Trivia: Fellow aLts Brady Bowcock(jimdiddy) and Jesse Slaton(JesseTheKing) also go to UQ!! SenSei from TA graduated a year after me and the great BakaInu goes there too! .


At UQ students were always chilling on the perfectly maintained lawns or playing frisbee in the great court. People were having FUN and enjoying their university life, and that feeling reverberated throughout the campus! Market day is held at the start of every semester over a few days and is a chance for new students to make friends and join clubs and is perfect for the people all alone in a new country. If you're from Singapore please don't just join the Singapore association as your club thats the fob thing to do go join other stuff like adventure stuff, the taiwan club or uq dance.


I love how the campus had a ferry terminal so on the days you felt stressed out and wanted a nice refreshing trip with cool sea breeze blowing in your face you could just take a ferry ride to the city and forget about all your worries, for like 20 mins then back to worrying about exams and life lol. Would enjoy playing soccer occasionally in their big field and tennis (expensive) and volley ball occasionally.

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The AZN Invasion!

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Universities are extremely costly to run and are usually subsidised by the government as it is in their interest because of all hard to exactly measure but still indirect benefits a well educated population brings to society. Educated citizens normally result in higher $GPD, less crime, more productivity, advancement of society etc. But of course running a university at such a subsidised rate for their citizens so they get the highest % of people learning means the money has to come from other sources in order for the model to be sustainable if not the system will self implode. Hence the difference in fees - university fees are huge for foreigners ($2,400 AUD per subject x 4 = 10K AUD every 6 months) whereas Australian pay like $500 AUD per subject (2k).


So it makes sense for universities to help cover their expenses by taking in foreign students (Hi TargA!) and advertising aggressively in foreign countries and that is also why you get so many Asians studying in Australia and this leads to alot of "Australian University fair days" in Singapore. Besides, the average foreign student studying in Australia ends up spending so much more (its basically like having tourist stay in your country spending money for 3 years), and generally the students enjoy their experience too so its win-win and everyone is happy.

Also, it seems trendy especially for Koreans to study or do a "working holiday" in Australia, with the logic being "to learn English in a country that speaks english". I'll talk more about why this fails so hard later on lol. Anyway why is Australia the most popular choice? If there was an income to overseas education table it would look something like this.


This is the case for Singaporeans and I believe most of the Asian countries like Taiwan, Hong Kong and Korea. And the majority of the people fit in the above average category, so thats is why they study in Australia, where you can get a good recognised degree, experience overseas education and culture and pay relatively alot less then what you would be paying in USA / Europe.

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The FOB issue

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The vast majority of Australian's are not racist, but still you will be treated "differently" depending on how you look/behave. Aka you will be invisible and avoided if you're a FOB. FOB stands for "fresh of the boat" and it stems from immigrants in the past who just came over and stubbornly retained all their own culture & language, sticking together as a herd and refusing to adapt to their new country. So basically if you act like a FOB you will be treated like a FOB. If you act like an non-fob you could have the most asian face in the world and it won't matter, you will just be treated like one of them, an Australian. It helps if you are seen with Australian friends and if you are invited to your Australian friend's small group house party you automatically become Australian and everyone is gonna love you want to know your life story. And then theres the semi-fobs which most students are, who have adapted a bit to the culture and mix around somewhat but have not stayed long enough there to have picked up the accent, dressing styles and customary behaviours completely.


Now Koreans as a community are a tight knit bunch that like to stay together and set up their own Korean restaurants, events, shops, groups, etc and all in Korean not english (lol how they gonna improve?!). They tend to speak Korean all the time, even in the presence of other people who can't understand not because they are rude but because they feel more comfortable speaking their own language and are very proud to be koreans. This happens ALOT with my wife and her friends who can all speak English decently but always forget and go to Korea land and im like "???? ENGLISH PLZ" when they start talking in Korean and then they gotta translate.

Anyway this is the number #1 reason why their "learn English expedition" fails so hard. Because most Koreans basically end up acting like FOBS and just stick to their own community. Sure there are some exceptions but most of the time this is the norm. So although it may sound extremely logical to spend all that money studying in a foreign country to learn English, the reality is alot of them end up not improving at all and when they return home and are supposedly to be able to speak english fluently (this is rare and respected in their country thats why they are sent over in the first place by their parents) it backfires hard lol. My wife's sister studied in United States for 5 years yet still has trouble communicating with me in basic English cause she just kept FOBBing it up like a boss in America lol! Yea obviously i mean no disrespect to any Koreans reading this, my wife is Korean and i love Korea but if you wanna learn English this is not the way to go! The fob metality applies to Singaporeans too, alot of them just stuck to their own singapore cliques the entire time they were in Australia.

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kellyMILKIES & love

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First story was when I got there and told bus drivers where I wanted to go to pay the appropriate bus fare, nobody could understand what I was saying and I often had to repeat myself, and they would give me a "omg what a fob!" look. I was taken aback because I always thought I had a good command of the English language and even liked to imitate the "Chinamen FOB accent" for fun, it then occurred to me, to them, I was the FOB now or at least sounded very much like one! You know how kellyMILKIES sounds? Well basically 90% of Singaporeans sound like that. And its sounds perfectly normal and understandable to us but we are just unaware that we are so undistinguishable to foreigners as we have been living in our sheltered little island all of all lives just speaking to one another. Anyway I realised Singaporeans have big problems pronouncing the "R" and "H" sound, for example they pronounce "Three" as "Tree". I spent quite alot of time working on my pronunciation of words practising with friends even going as far as to download a pronunciation video course and a month later I never had language problems again for the rest of my time in Australia and am really proud of that!

To digress, the majority of Singaporeans are chinese, so Singaporeans and Malaysian Chinese have very similar accents. They are alot better sounding than Mainland Chinese because we have years of experience as English as our first language, so the sentences come out smoothly but pronunciations still reflect that of chinese phonetics. Mainland chinese are very nationalistic and extremely proud of their language and hence have been slow to adopt english and do not have much experience, so their sentences often sound very disjointed taking slight pauses between words and stressing intonations needlessly, like what you have to do if you speak mandarin. The only other country in Asia where the majority of people speak english is the philippines who had the fortune of being colonised by America thats why they speak English in the first place with the phonetics of their native language tagalog being closer sounding to English. So yea to the outside viewer JacziE sounds great and kelly not as much when they cast but its not her fault. Most of the time a persons language ability or even attitudes and behaviour are the product of the nation and environment they were born in and exposed to so its silly to hate on someone who had little control over those influencing factors. Its like hating someone cause he was born ugly, its stuff that can't be changed. What can be changed tho is the attitude on how criticism is handled and effort to make self-improvement once you are made aware of the situation. hi kelly!

Second story is on love. Four days after I arrived in Australia, I somehow ended up "hooking up" with a Taiwanese girl I met on orientation day who shall now be referred to as Taiwan. In jest i was telling Sheepy how I'm going to use my time in Australia to "explore the different cultures in the world" but never expected that to happen so quickly. Anyway the thing that was kinda crazy was Taiwan turned out to be a lovely and sweet girl and shortly after she ended up being my girlfriend for the next 2 years, meaning my mission to "explore the different cultures of the world" came to an abrupt end . She was a very gentle and obedient girl and i miss her alot, and we had such a fantastic time exploring the city together with our friends, visiting all the different suburbs and malls, clubbing, studying for exams, breaking all the laws in our dormitory and experiencing this new exciting life in a foreign land together.

Trivia: She was a non gamer who knew nothing about starcraft but she even knew sen's real name because hes was so famous for starcraft 1 at that time already. Unbelievable!!!!

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Coming soon!

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Part 2: University Life projects and exams
Run in with the police in Toowoomba, the gf curse, dog attack, interesting encounters.

Part 3: Working in Australia
Behind the scenes stories from working at Myers, Cesears Nightclub and being a UQ Staff. Bar fights, and the incredible perks of being a faculty staff!

Part 4: Lifestyles and Attitudes
sunny bank, south bank, cooking, renting, racist encounters!