After the matriculation year in 1980 (see this post), I managed to get into University of Adelaide doing a physics degree as required by my scholarship that I had from Malaysian Ministry of Education. Those who had JPA scholarships, they tend to do more professional courses like medicine, engineering and architecture. To some extent, we tend to be considered 'inferior' by some. Like many others in Malaysia, I actually applied for engineering degree since we had imagined that it had better job security. So there was this feeling of just go with the flow in the beginning. I found myself to be better in the mathematics courses than physics. Chemistry was the worse (despite it was my best subject in school) with its 5pm lectures (with most of us dozing off).
During the early part of first year, I stayed with Khir and Shaiful in a town house in Devon Street North (see pic below).
The first pic was taken during our first day at University of Adelaide. The second was taken in our living room just in front of the kitchen. Our rooms were upstairs with me taking the smallest room facing the stairs. To get to the university, we normally take the train at Goodwood station.
Later that year, when Shaiful went back to Malaysia, we had another housemate Zaifulizan - he is on the right in the pic below, taken during 'Eid. In the next pic (taken during the same 'Eid), one can also see Nahar, my senior at school, who was also there.
Our life were pretty much focused at the university. It is only during the weekends, that we tend to go out to visit friends and if we are in luck, we will get free meals. Like during our matriculation year, most of our scholarship went to rent but at this time the amount is slightly bigger and conditions were a bit better. At times, things can get difficult and we had to save on food. I remember at some point, we didn't have enough money to buy much and at one point we just had rice with fried onions with turmeric (I remember this well because I was cooking the meal).
Later we moved again to a proper house with new housemates, Suhaimi and Halim (they are my juniors) - see their pics below at our new place, together with our landlord. How we organise ourselves together depends very much with whom we socialize. I remember we were close with Yem (Ibrahim) throughout the university life. You can see him below with the garden pick. These pics are taken while we were trying to move our things. It is a good thing that we had good friends that were always there to help. Much indebted to them.
Being at a proper house, I was able to hire drum sets during the term holidays to practice (otherwise I had to disturb others - asking permission to play at their place; they seem to be tolerant then - my apologies that they had to put up with all the noises and loud music). The next pic was our experimental music session - playing with pots and pans instead. We recorded that and I remembered listening with my musical brother and there were some magical moments. He noticed that Halim was good at his vocals.
One skill that I had acquired over the years is cooking which I likened as experiments. I had recipes given by my mum for which I had to experiment a little, sometimes to find a suitable substitute. I remembered baking cakes that seemed to work - creamed corn cake, coffee cake, boiled fruit cake. We usually go to the oriental food stores to get our spices (when we have enough money), while the rest at our local groceries. Sometimes during weekends, I cooked for guests coming over to our place (see pics). The second pic was taken during Eid when our junior lady friends came visiting with Yem.
Our Eids were mostly spent at the Adelaide mosque where we get to meet almost everyone. Since Eid is not a public holiday there, I remembered people rushing back to the universities to attend lectures, labs and even exams, after attending the function at the mosque. Here are more pics.
It was only during the third year that I got more serious with my studies. The third year was the year that we had to specialize by choosing two subject programmes. I had the choice between Physics, Pure Mathematics, Applied Mathematics and Mathematical Physics. I opted for Applied Mathematics and Mathematical Physics. I took all courses offered by these two programmes and that kept me busy. At the time, I thought to myself that Applied Mathematics would be closer to Mathematical Physics. I was mistaken of course. This is best explained in a different post.
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