Hostel life can become part and parcel of your everyday life if you study overseas and do not opt for off-campus housing. In the case of NUSHS what happens is that we're getting the experience first (and partially because no matter where you are in Singapore you never really are too far away from home).
When moving into Hostel the first thing you want to do is to:
- Do a tally of what's there and what's not there. Sometimes this may be checklist aided, but if it's not you should still do it anyway. This will tell you what you need to leave behind in good working condition when you finally check out, and what is missing that you need to purchase/bring on your own.
- Clean the room. Hostel rooms can be of varying cleanliness standard, but I personally find it good practice to give the room a thorough wipe down before. This is because there's all kinds of funny grime that gets stuck in very, very weird places.
- Check to make sure that a couple of things are working, namely your table lamps, fans, room lights, hot water supply and shoe rack. The shoe racks are DIY wooden racks from IKEA that technically get blown to smithereens if you chuck your shoes on it hard enough, so you'll want to check if it needs to be replaced. My room also had a faulty drawer lock when I checked in last year, so I got it replaced pronto.
- Study Well. The rooms are, in general, light deficient after 7pm. If you are used to having good lighting when you study I suggest you look into purchasing an additional table lamp. The ceiling lights are to be turned off at 11pm in order to ensure that if your room mate wants to sleep he or she can get sufficient, uninterrupted rest. However you and your roommate choose to interpret this rule is your choice, but after 11pm, if you do not have any other arrangements, the only light source you get is a mono-directional, angled beam from the table lamp
- Know the locations in and around Hostel. At some point in time you are going to get bored of Hostel food, or for some reason or another you will be eating out. There will be other occasions when you need to buy stationery, stock up on basic supplies and the likes thereof. Essentially, think of Hostel as the incenter of an obtuse triangle. The two vertices which are nearer to the incenter are Clementi Central (CC)and West Coast Plaza (WCP). CC is home to NTUC Fairprice and the Big Bookshop, and WCP is home to Cold Storage and Popular. If you know where to go, you can also find a Sheng Siong outlet and some rather great hawker center food. In terms of absolute walking distance, WCP is closer and you are sheltered most of the way so long you cut through the HDB estates, but traveling there can become a problem if the back gate is locked. The furthest vertex is actually Sunset Way, which is pretty far down, but home to some amazing things. Stuff there is also a bit cheaper, depending on what you are looking for.
- Come up with a list of "staple foods". When I say staple foods, I mean things that don't cost too much, are individually packed and can keep you going when you get hungry. It also helps if you get foodstuff that is healthy but allows you to consume more than one serving of it. There will be days when you stay up late for a variety of reasons, be it to rush homework/projects or purely to watch a movie till late. Hostel provides packed biscuits and rations to the pantry once a month which everyone is free to consume, but if you are like me and stay in a guys cluster, where the appetite is generally larger, the rations generally last no longer than a week. Such food comes in handy. Here's an example of what I kept on standby: LEXUS biscuits, because they are individually wrapped packets of two biscuits, come at SGD3 a pack of 12 and are pretty tasty. Eggs, which I would purchase every week, because I make my own breakfast, and as good flavouring if you make noodles . Cereal, for the exigency when you wake up late and don't have time to go down for breakfast or make breakfast, because you can just pour this out and munch. A couple of cans of tuna, which don't take up a lot of space, are generally energy giving and can garnish everything from bread to becoming an ingredient in another larger dish.
- Prepare a roster. There's going to be another person in your immediate vicinity and another two who you will hear if they decide to make enough noise. Coincidentally, all four of you share the same toilet, and because there's an adjoining pathway, any dirt that enters from one side may eventually end up on another side. In addition, if you, like yours truly, happens to be put up in a room that faces the highway, your room will turn into a dirt trap and dust multiplier. To give you an idea of the amount of dust that gathers, if you leave an uncovered mug untouched for two days, expect to wipe a layer of dust off the surface. What I'm driving at, is that you need to come up with a good roster of who cleans what and when. The windows definitely need cleaning, the mirrors will need cleaning, the floor needs both vacuuming and mopping and the toilet needs decontamination at least once a fortnight to maintain good sanitary conditions. I find it helps if you arrange a date when all four mates roll up their sleeves and enjoy themselves making the place clean.
- Know your cleaning materials. As mentioned in the previous point, dust gathers, and dust stays. I started off by mopping the floor consistently and wiping every surface, but I found that that was highly inefficient because we just don't have the time to keep doing that. However, if you visit DAISO or any home supply store, you'll be able to pick up some rather large tape rollers (or lint rollers) that you can use. These things look like paint rollers, but with a thick roll of tape on the roll that you peel off once the stickiness is spent. If you use it as a surface cleaner, by rolling the thing over contact surfaces, you can get pretty clean without much effort. Secondly, vacuuming the floor will remove the dirt, but it does not remove the grime and oil that gathers. You'll need to mop the floor to get rid of that. You can use stuff like Magiclean wipers for that, or you can use the tried and tested get-on-your-knees-and-use-a-wet-cloth combo. Both work fine. Third, mirrors can be cleaned using newspaper or glass cleaner and a chamois cloth. Clearly one is more economical than the other, but it ultimately depends on what you want to do. The design of the toilet is such that you put your toothbrushes and mugs on a latch that is directly in front of the mirrors, so the bottom part of the mirror actually gets stained pretty badly. The sink tops also acquire quite a bit of dirt. Lastly, the best way to clean the toilet is to move everything out and use a combination of the hose and a good brush to scrub the surfaces. Hair should also be cleaned from the hair traps at regular intervals, or you'll end up with a jammed toilet.
- Play Cheat. I know of some people who actually solved all of the problems mentioned in the above paragraph by bringing in a robotic cleaning device, a.k.a a Roomba. Feel free to look it up
- Sleep well. For the uninitiated, the Hostel mattress is a very heavy, hard mattress. I suppose its just the specific design, but if you happen to be accustomed to sleeping on soft, adaptive mattresses, you may need to acquire a comforter at your own cost. I and my roommate each got one to maximize sleeping comfort in general. I add a caveat here that we've tested empirically and verified that Army Officer Cadet School barracks possess softer mattresses. That aside, there's only one particular comforter that matches the specifications of the school bed (as of when I purchased it in January 2009, and as far as I was led to believe - I may be mistaken). Ask in the tag if you want to know more.
- Find the best place to study. The Hostel has a study room which is air-conditioned and is opened till quite late at night. You can bring food in so long you don't make a mess of the place, and there's a wireless access point for Internet. Many people opt to study there instead of in their rooms for a variety of reasons, but my point here is that you should find the best place for yourself to study. There may come a day when your roommate decides to invite another three friends over for a tete a tete involving loud music, screaming, chips, and a host of other extremely tantalizing, albeit distracting influences. When that happens, you can always go to the pantry, use the benches on the ground floor or use the study room.
- Decide what you want to do on the Internet. Most locals are accustomed to relatively decent Internet speeds at home. There's a common grouse that the Internet in Hostel is relatively slow, and I can't really find an objective way to describe the situation. There's also cases when the Internet goes down for some reason or the other or a particular site that you need gets blocked. Youtube videos generally stream slowly and downloading files with a double digit megabyte size normally involves single or small double digit kilobyte speeds. If you're the type that needs a lot of Internet and good speeds, look into investing in a mobile Broadband plan. These are SIM cards that fit in a USB stick, which you plug into your computer. The subscription plans vary for each service provider, but note that not all providers offer unlimited bandwidth. On another note, the Hostel Internet server reboots every midnight, so for about five minutes you find yourself without any connection. If you're planning to do any downloading, Internet Banking or use any services that require uninterrupted connections, do it before midnight.
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