Today is Saturday, and i went clubbing last night with a girl from korea nad a girl from malaysia. I forgot that for clubbing , people were required to have dresscodes and so i wore a 'save the environment' t-shirt, basketball shoes and 3/4 pants to meet up with the girls. The girls, whom i met in university during the day, were quite interesting.
The first girl was malaysian, but having lived in australia for the better half of her teenage life, i reckon the only thing about her that is malaysian - like me - is the fact that she has a malaysian passport. Now she was quite the spectacle. She was wearing thick glasses in school with long sleeved tees and jeans. This look associates most people as the typical nerdy foreign asian student in a university. Now that night, she miraculously transformed. She had wild curvy hair, without glasses, and wearing a sort of spaghetti straps + tanktop combination dress with really really short translucent filmsy type skirt and she danced in a really sexualy charged way. But more on that later.
So i met this supposedly innocent and goody good shoe girl at night, along with this other korean girl and we were supposed to meet up with another guy but he didnt come. I was quite surprised at the outfit she was wearing, but then was reminded of the fact that we were going to a nightclub afterall, and everyone dresses more or less like that. And instead the odd one out was me with my basketball shoes and ankle pants. So we went off to the korean girls place and she got me more funky shoes, and we went to the nightclub and danced till 5 in the morning afterwhich we went off for some food before i walked home.
On my way home i went into victoria market, just to check it out since i pass by it everyday but it was always closed. Now the later experience i had was surreal, after a whole day at the university, and buying groceries and subsequently dancing the night away till dawn, dead tired and abit tipsy, i was in a large warehouse where there were two long rows of bright fresh red meat, along with carcasses of cows and chickens, interspaced with rows of fish stores. And everyone seemed mindless, cutting up flesh and lining them up precisesly in rows and columns of bright red with the most meticulous care a person can give. And 200m long rows of stores were doing this simultaneously. At one point i imagined how similiar human society was compared with this meat processing facility. We grow up being fed and taken care of in school and university, most of us as mindless as the animals themselves that we feed on, and then we are released into the society, where we work and work to serve 'the society'. Never truly being able to change the state of the environment we are in, nor neither having the ambition or interest to do so.
So eitherways, i went home and got into bed, and went to sleep. I woke up at about 3 and went to shop for bicycles with Jye, a friend who has posted a commentary here on secfive before. After that we just walked around, looking at pidgeons and sitting around. Melbourne is just such a great city in that sense. You can just walk around, relax, talk and enjoy the culture and life of the people, without feeling urge or any particular purpose. I cannot imagine doing this in either Brunei, malaysia or singapore as in brunei, the weather is absolutely horrible, the birds are ugly, and there are no public amenities. There are no chairs or sculptures or shades for you to walk in, sit on or look at, there are no water fountains that offer you water when you are thristy. In singapore there are such amenities, albeit little, but the atmosphere there is fatal. The peoples faces all seem to be engraved with overwhelming purpose, either that or abandon, apathy or lethargy. And these are not faces that encourage you to sit down ,relax and have a good chat with a friend over a meal or drink with pidgeons and statues. A truly fatal atmosphere. As for malaysia, the place just seems dirty, and polluted. The vehicles and people are noisy and loud, and the people too share a sense of fatality as do their singaporean counterparts, albeit not to the same extend. The hot weather, like the parallel effect of temperature on all chemical and thus biological organisms, seems to accelerate the temper, guile and general pace of society in these equatorial countries, and in my perspective, this is detrimental.
Apart from that, school work has been exciting, engaging and fun. My first week of university life has reinforced in me, my passion for the subject of architecture , the pure art of utility. I cannot think of any other subject that i would want to be doing instead of architecture. I enjoy all my lectures, and my tutorials and classes. However i do note that my peers seem to find the topic abit overbearing and tedious. But i am not fit to judge my peers.
The only thing lamentable about Melbourne is that the sun is overpowering, and scalds the naked skin. Apart from that, the weather seems to be fine and dandy. I've also encountered hail last week, much to my pleasant surprise - little blobs of ice that plitter platters on the surfaces of manmade buildings, oblivious to their purpose in nature, but ever consistent. Entities that do what they do but are never able to find beyond themselves, the meaning for their existence in nature. Are they a product of a greater whole ? or a part that constitutes to a greater whole ? They do not know, they just plitter platter when they are summoned. Indeed!, what a blissful existence.
