What Is The Most Invaluable Experience That I Have Gained When Studying Abroad?

Some people might ask, what is the most invaluable experience that I have gained when studying abroad?

Cultures? Beautiful landscape? Excellent education system? Travelling all across Australia?

All of the answers are valid.

But for this post I chose to answer it a bit slightly different:

The most invaluable experience that I have gained is the opportunity to live in a house with my fellow friends

Right.

Dishes

How many times have you come across your kitchen sink, and notice more than a couple of unwashed dishes? Stressed out? Chill. This is just one of the many tribulations that we will face. For students who happened to live in a house with fellow friends here in Malaysia, I can guarantee you that this rarely happens.

The answer is simple. Students (especially) don’t cook at home. In Malaysia you can just grab a nasi goreng kampung across the street for RM3 and save your 1 hour. That’s 5 cents per minute. Quite cheap. On the contrary, students oversea cook (right?). They don’t have a choice. Food outside is way too expensive, and most of them are non-halal. So, my point is, to be able to experience this type of tribulation you have to make the kitchen smoked (dapur berasap) more often.

It’s not just about the sink

Dishes is just one of the many bad habits that we can find when living together. Unhanged towels, unwashed toilet, unthrowed toilet rolls, unclosed toilet bowl(?), unorganised cutlery, unflushed finished work, are some of the common thing that fell into the same category. So, all in all we can categorise this type of thing into one term, “unsettled habits” (at least for this post).

First, I want you to accept the fact that we all have at least 1 of these unsettled habits. Some people might have 16, but I’m saying here at least we will have 1.

Is it a big deal? Person A might think unthrowed finished toilet rolls is a mega super big deal, and unwashed dishes are just mere caterpillar crawling on some random tree (meaning not really a big deal). While Person B will see unclosed toilet bowl flip flap as if the sky is falling,  and unflushed finished work is just like a caterpillar thingy (whoever person B is truly it is NOT just a caterpillar thingy!).

Believe me this is what we will face after getting married. There are no mr or miss perfect in this world. So, accept other people’s caterpillar typa thing, and do your best to improve yours.

Einstein Theory of Relativity

According to Einstein, the world revolves around you. In reality, trust me it’s not! This life is not just about you. We live in a community, where we are suppose to help out each other. Egoism, whether we realise it or not, is making the world not a better place to live in.

Taking the dish as an example, if a person decides to wash his own dishes only, will that make the sink clean? Well, logically that’s what people do nowadays right? I take care of my family, and that’s it! He claims that if everyone take care of their own matters, everything will be smooth. Right?

WRONG!!!

Shared Resources

Let me introduce you to shared resources. Mathematically speaking, if in one dinner of 5 people, each people wash their own dishes, the leftover dishes will not be zero. Because we still have the Rice Pot, the Jug, the Ayam Masak Kicap Pot, and et cetera. That is what we call shared resources. So, there must be extra effort done here. Same goes when we live in this world.

In a nutshell, one person should wash more than their own dishes! (read: do daa’wah).