Luca's adventures in Sarawak

Ello! This is the ramblings of Luca Grossi (me), while on student exchange in Sarawak Malaysia. Feel free to check it out!

Friday, March 23, 2007

Arrggh my stomach is soo full from eating soo much , it seems to be a vicious cycle where we all go out and eat after anyone has finished classes and each time adding more dish’s from the menu to include in my meal. It was raining today and after a rasa rasa fest we headed over to king center where there are a whole lot of shops , coffee shops ( food outlets) and a supermarket where we normally go shopping. After shopping we went to the bakery to buy some bread , like I mentioned before even having a massive meal were also brought in desert, well while in the bakery we decided to buy a cake. Their like asking us what the occasion was & if we wanted it to say anything on the top.. a minute later where decorating our own cake. Good times..
Also I’ve now got my very own hair dresser Dan , during the week I got pissed off with my mop being the last time I had a hair cut was at Tid so in normal Dan fashion he didn’t decline on the opportunity to go hax on my hair with the backup plan to shave it all off ( which at the time didn’t really phase me but now that I think about it I’m glad I didn’t have too). Uni’s going well , managing to balance stuff out even though I’m studying at the hostel , originally I was going to spend time in the main uni building until late and then arrival when it shut ,, just so that I wouldn’t be disrupted but there’s no need. I really don’t mind occasionally people walking in and out ,, having a quick chat or just quickly use the internet , I enjoy the company and find it an awesome way to break up the studies.
Off to the bako national park this weekend , I didn’t bring any malaria tablets but dave brought a whole lot from home so I’ve started taking them for my weekend expedition in the rain forest , actually looking forward to it and its definitely what a had planned to see it before leaving home so hopefully when I return I’ll be able to put up some pictures of kuching’s natural wildlife and landscape,, that reminds me I’ll have to take a photo of the overview looking mountains on the 8th floor of the uni building

Guys been hanging shit on me all arvo ,, I’ve been eating all afternoon .. its like 12:30am and I just finished preparing my toasted peanut butter and jelly sandwich

posted by Luca @ 3:35 am   4 comments

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Well I’m truly well over this assignment for tonight ,, it’s a mammoth programming assignment which I’m doing by myself so it’s taking time but slowly slowly I’m get there. Was a hectic weekend with going out on both Friday and Saturday night, Friday involved checking out a nightclub in called soho ,polishing a few drinks I tried my moves on a nonexistent dance floor and then met a few other international Swinny students. After an hour or so we decided to head off to our normal hangout place where a few nightclubs are situated called travillien. We walked around a little at one instant having no idea where we were going so wer camped ourselves at a road intersections asking people to drive us there for 10 ringgit, asked a guy with a broken guitar for directions only for him to ask for money ,, me keeping to confuse things further by suggesting wrong directions :) but eventually we got to where we wanted. Place called ringtap, its further out of the city and seriously full of locals only , with Malay music pumping and people staring, the place has a completely different vibe compared to other places where been to. General Observations and highlights of the night were
- First time I’ve seen gay guys in Malaysia, Sam gave a go trying to dance with them ,, heh funny as
- Seriously amazing how guys swarm to the all the girls, totally boxing them in and not allowing them to move , totally persistent ( Well this was on the dance floor )
- Amazing how the girls could be dancing with one guy and then suddenly revert to another guy ( for instants dancing beside her or something ) like it happen to get once or twice where this girl would start dancing with me and the bloke totally pissed off and infuriated, I remember thinking no way lady your not bring me into your world ..
- For some reason if there are a group of girls huddle together some random dude would try and convince me to try and pick one up,, no idea but they think us white guys can break the ice for them to join them , get beaten up by weary guys no idea
- Under the watchful eye of Dan, I was noted immediately of the presents of sheboys entered the place. Not like everything would happened but I couldn’t tell.

After coming home late at night me and Sam manage to have a fire extinguisher show down , unfortunately for us we live right beside the warden napie which heard us straight away I got away through the thick cloud of smoke ( felt bad the next morning ) I promised I wouldn’t be disruptive but at the end of the day we didn’t damage anything and I’m sure he understands.
Uni’s going well , seem to be managing well, did have a period last week which was kinda intense , had to do with submitting documents for final year project. I did a large portion of the writing and seem to do I fairly good job at it ,, ( using my experiences from last year ) which improved my understanding of what needs to be throughout at the beginning of designing software. I’ve got good guy members but sometime they seem to think rather limited ,, actually that’s an under statement , like the night before the document was due and explained to one of the guys what topics he needed to discuss ,, the following day I meet him before the presentation with these words “ do you know the stuff we were talking about yesterday ,, I couldn’t really think of anything to type” I manage to predetermine something like that was going to happen so I tried to cover it,, maybe next time I’ll spend more time so that this doesn’t happen again. Also last week we had a lunch with a few external and internal uni representatives,, like the pro chancellor for Swinburne Sarawak, people from hawthorn and America interesting to hear our experience so far.

This weekend going to the bako national park for 2 days ,, get camping gear so I better start thinking about that or else I’m have something stupid to blog early next week ,,
Also got my laptop and wireless connection decked out in my hostel room , still got the joint for myself! Also got my Skype account working ( account : luca.grossi ) so if your got it setup give me a buzz !

posted by Luca @ 5:19 am   1 comments

Friday, March 16, 2007

Hey Everyone , There goes my idea to try and post every second day ,but seriously been off my feet during the pass few days that I’ve barely had a chance to shower. For my final year project we had to hand up two documents and only until Monday did we have the information to start on it also had to fit in Sam birthday party :). I’m just in the lab at the moment waiting to do my presentation and hand in our two documents but apparently this requires two hours to do ( hence me writing this). Anyways on Monday we had Sam’s birthday and celebrated by going to Eddy’s house, awesome time and my first time in a Malaysia house. Also went to get my laptop with Dan, fregging happy as with it ,, I wasn’t planning to get such a beast and with Dan being a gamer I just kept upping the specs but I really haven’t looked back! Also at the hostel my air-condition manage to spring a leak , cautioning my bedroom to look like a swamp but I’ve totally neglected until I handed in this work so tonight I’ll go something about it. Also had to put up with a guy stealing our stuff from the fridge in the shared kitchen , Dan wrote a massive fu*k off note so hopefully that’s sorted that out , I was a victim of getting 4 apples stolen ,, like the person stole a few redbulls and chocolate and seriously why apples.





At Eddy's house ,, starting from left
Naomi, Eddy, Dan and Me
Posted by Picasa

posted by Luca @ 2:20 pm   3 comments

Saturday, March 10, 2007

Rules are meant to be broken, last night I had my stupid 6:30 to 8:30pm class for eng management only to listen to the lecturer wondering off track and telling irrelevant stories. When I got back to the hostel I ended up finding the guys drinking in the kitchen with the tunes pumping and singing. I quickly got myself a drink and starting joining alone, around 10:00 Dan got a call from napie the warden officer telling us to turn the music down because people were complaining that the music was too loud so we ended up turning down the music. Around half an hour later we heard knocking on the kitchen door, after opening the door we had a guy from uni administration storm through telling us off because we were drinking and had a girl in the room ( which both things aren’t allowed ). We followed the guy out side only to then meet up with a group of hostel students with the hostel lady supervisor, I remember walking to go outside down the corridor and seeing a group of people, I think at first we were all surprised to see so many people apparently pissed off with us. At the beginning we were totally denied all accusations, I remember Dan saying to the guy that stormed in “girls? What girls there wasn’t any girls” and the guy saying “how stupid do you think I am”, pretty funny stuff, I can ever keep a straight face in situations like that. Anyways we sorted it mostly out, the main issue wasn’t the music being too loud or the girls, I think it was became we locked the Kitchen and a one or two people got pissed off with us. It wasn’t like we weren’t letting people in, there would have been occasions where they probably didn’t knock hard enough so we didn’t hear them, (yet again the room was pretty noise with all of us trying to sing) but its funny how no one first came to approach us and talk with us before calling uni management. We ended up going out straight after to town, had an awesome night but pretty tired today just from dancing all night and also you get so much people wanting to talk to you it really gets full on at times but I enjoy it. Also yesterday went to look for a laptop with this girl I met in my data structures class name Cynthia, she drove me around town and brought me to sabasak were it’s a 4 level type of mall just full of computer shops and helped me bargain for prices.. so early this week I’ll go in there and get my laptop. She’s a cool girl just somebody to hang out with from time to time. Uni’s getting pretty hectic but I’m keeping up, got most of my subjects under control and hitting straight for the assignments and tutorials, also final year project is ramping up with me being the project lead ( got on idea what that means :) ) but I’m always organsing meets and keeping tabs with things , either on Monday or Tuesday were going to meet our client for the first time so tomorrow I’ll spend most of my time preparing for that.

Another funny thing that happened during the week was that my Bangladeshi friend sandeep lock himself out side of his room, so around 11:00 pm I get a call asking me if me could sleep in my room because I had the spare bed. I got back to the hostel and had a few drinks with dave, during that time he come down to my room and joined in the conversation and went off again. Before he returned I decided to go to bed and lock the door, knowing he was going to come back I just presumed he was going to be able to wake me up by either ringing or knocking. I woke up the next morning with 20 missed calls. Hhaha poor guy ended up sleeping in the common room, only to be woken up by football fans in the morning wanting to watch the soccer .. to make it worst he also had is first test the following day ,,

Lastly organised my plane trip back home at the ended of the year, how weird is this that exams over here run before and after Christmas till the end of December so that stopped me from coming home for Christmas. Also Jan is full booked so if I plan to come back to Australia it will be early February. I decided to leave Kuching at the start of Jan and spend a month in west Malaysia to Kuala Lumpur and go from there!

posted by Luca @ 5:25 pm   2 comments

Wednesday, March 07, 2007

Not much has been happening, slowly getting into a routine and things are starting to pick up. Today I moved my things into the new hostel, I’m still in a twin share room but at the moment no one else is in there with me so the boys have taken over the other side of the room and put dan’s desktop to play video games. Went shopping this arvo noon to buy some cooking utensils for our new kitchen, where all craving for pasta and bacon and eggs for breakfast now all we need is a cook. Also eddie our local malay- Chinese’s “salve ( so we call him) hooked us up with a local alcohol shop close by for cheap deals, we ended up buying 4 bottles ( 1 liter bottles) of vodka absolute I think we now have all 4 favors, leche fruit spirit and cognac roughly around $30 dollars Australian each bottle. Ah yeah before I forget on Sunday after having a hungover at 8:30 morning I woke up and went with my room mate to the local Christianity mass, it was all in Chinese so this guy attempt to translate what the pastoral was saying ,, it lasted 3 hours .. the scary part was when they scream in gibberish to pray ( I forgot what its called – similar scheme in Borat the movie) .. and personally the analogies the pastoral used to back up verses in the bible where pretty lame ,, but anyway got a free lunch and an experience ,, I think there expecting me to go back and I’m not soo sure :) but yeah I totally span them out when I walked into the door hah

posted by Luca @ 2:13 am   0 comments

Sunday, March 04, 2007

Its three o’clock in the morning and I’m just in Daniel’s room with Dave and myself , just came back from a nightclub area in kuching and really had just a massive night. Sam this afternoon came back from watching the soccer and Liverpool losing against man united which he was devastated about so he manage to convince us all to go out. We totally ran a muck inside the club , people are now familiar who we are and where we come from so I’m starting to feel really comfortable with the place. We were all dancing out of control ( if anyone has seen me dance you’ll know what I mean) and meeting a stack of different people. Dan got the DJ to announce our names and mentioned how there were aussies around, we were chanting aussie aussie aussie. Anyways all seriousness this is going to be the end of my 4 night partying streak and time to dig in and start focusing on uni. Today we went to the Sarawak culture village to get footage taken of us( multi cultural group) doing activities that the place provides to use for marketing so putting photo’s in brochures advising Malaysia to the rest of the world. Awesome day with so much eating and trying so many activities take are native to the iban tribe but the bright side was I met a lot of other people , organised and found out information about a music festival coming up with is composed by a bunch of national and international native tribe groups ( apparently it’s a really good time ) but yeah totally stuffed at the moment so hope to sleep in tomorrow morning and just relex before starting uni again on Monday. Night!

posted by Luca @ 7:09 am   1 comments