Life as an impoverished student

Oh nooo... medical books here are so expensive! Went to Ramsay Bookstore to get a white coat and this surgery book (Clinical Problems in General Medicine and Surgery by Peter Devitt). To my utter horror, the prices are almost the same as back in Malaysia, only they're in AUD. In Kamal, it's RM90. Here, it's AUD89.85 (So damn weird wan, 85 cents). OMG!!!!!!! It's like triple the price! And the labcoat is no cheaper la. Seems like they were short white coats here, not the nice, long white ones. Been getting some mixed advice bout whether we must wear our coats to the hospital, but bought one anyway just to be on the safe side.

I'm starting to appreciate the little things back home that I took for granted. A constantly well-stocked kitchen, not having to think of what to cook every night, cheap Asian groceries, Indian kedai runcits with the old-fashioned coconut grinding machine....etc etc etc... We've been cooking dinner almost every night now. Eating out is just way to expensive. Must start planning my cooking and make a shopping list already. We've been buying groceries almost every day and the following day sure got something we forgot to get!

Being a lousy cook and student in country where everything costs $X2.8, we can't help but convert everytime we buy stuff. I'm gradually getting used to the prices here already though. Can't keep converting and freaking myself out of eating every time. Here are some things we've managed to cook so far...

Staple food for the first week: Lebanese Pita bread with ham + pastrami + fried egg + cheese + siew pak choy. Not bad actually.

The super-oily and super-jelak honey beef sausages! The sausages here are nice (but very soft/lam pek pek compared to Malaysian ones). However, this was the second night we had honey beef sausages, and somehow they were drenched in oil. Ugh. Just watching Ken finish them up made me nauseous. The pot on top contains ABC soup courtesy of Jebbrine.

Now this meal was tasty. Sick of the oil, we started microwaving our food instead. The grand-daddy of all choy sam (had to boil for quite long to make it edible) and chicken drumsticks + egg in piri piri spices and black pepper. Our first spicy meal here!

I know it doesn't look appetizing, but it tasted pretty good.

Jebbrine with her spaghetti and siew pak choy.

Nope, we didn't cook this! Went to this pizza place last weekend and got this super huge pizza. Very nice. :) Especially after walking 10 minutes in the blistering cold. In shorts.

I never thought I'd resort to doing this: One of our IMU seniors told us of some buffet places in Chinatown where you pay lets say $5 and get to pile your plate with as much food as possible. Considering that I spent a horrendous amount on that surgery book and white coat, might as well save some money. No $5 buffet though, but we found this stall with a $6.80 buffet. So Jebbrine and I shared a plate. There's fried rice and noodles with some dishes just like those economy rice stalls. We desperately (and very kiasuly) piled mountains on our plate... It was like borderline gluttony I tell you! Had to stop when brocolli started rolling off my plate. Thank goodness we weren't the only ones doing this. Some ang mohs also exhibited typical 'Malaysian' qualities too. Suffice to say, we were quite full at the end. The food was not that good. Very, very oily. Can feel my arteries clogging up already. Jebbrine and I couldn't finish the rice because it was so oily. On the other hand, beggars can't be choosers. Where can you find $3.40 worth of rice and dishes per person?

A mountain of food for Jebbrine and me: fried (oily) rice, brocolli, Szechuan chicken, fried calamari (1% squid and 99% flour), honey chicken (a big pile behind the rice), and 2 BBQ chicken drumsticks. Hopefully we'll be able to cook tastier and healthier meals when we move in to our new houses.