Education Abroad Student Blog

We have been in Kuching for over a month now and we are still having a lot of fun now we are settling in. We no longer sweat five litres of sweat an hour (down to about three), and the very same food that had us sprinting to the bathroom six weeks ago has become a pleasure to eat (and digest).

Classes are well underway by now, there are so many clubs at uni and in Kuching up that you can join. So far between us we have become involved in three different groups for weekly indoor soccer, the badminton club, the local volleyball team, and soon the basketball and rugby club. Scott (the other Australian exchange student at Sarawak has even managed to work his way up through the ranks to become the Vice President of the cooking club.

Despite the fact we have been here for a while now, the novelty of some things never wear off. One thing that still has us laughing is the random behaviour and locations of stray animals. For example last night we were sitting down having a meal at this cafe and one of our mates just suddenly screams and jumps out of his seat - somehow this quite large, hungry cat managed to sneak under the table and jump up between his legs.

I also went to a local nightclub last weekend and as I was walking towards the back of the place I saw this dog just wandering around the club. I guess it just wanted to roll up the sleeves and have a few bourbons as any regular dog would do at 2.00am on a Saturday night.

One thing that is definitely still funny (not to mention terrifying) is the highly erratic and strange behaviour of fellow motorists. Apart from the normal stuff (driving 100km/h in 20km zone, driving 20km/h in 100km zone, driving on wrong side of road etc.), one of our favourites is people riding motorbikes carrying large amounts of construction material. One guy we saw on a motorbike was carrying about 8 planks of wood under his arm; each one had about 10 large nails sticking out of it. To make it worse, he was carrying them with the nails pointing upwards, the top plank being right underneath his chin.

The important thing whilst driving here is not to get pissed off - they're not big on road rage here. On a daily basis we're the victims (and very, very occasionally the perpetrators) of bad driving so bad that it would probably result in a homicide back in Australia.