Places to Eat in Adelaide

One of the things I enjoyed in Adelaide is the food. It's hard to find a place here where the food is lousy. The other thing I like: food here is cheaper compared to Sydney and Melbourne.

Here's a list of places we usually went to when hungry:

• Dumpling King, Chinatown. Dumpling is good here. Try also the fried noodles and the little dumplings. (A$8.00 per person).
• Hong Phat, Grote St. (near Coles). Cheap place to get good roast duck, salt and pepper squid and pork ribs.
• Barbecue City, Gouger St, Central Market. More pricey than Dumpling King and Hong Phat, but the food is also good here. (A$15.00 per person).
• Felafel Stop, Gouger St (near Cash Converters). We liked ordering the vegetarian felafel's here and their baclava. Coffee is not so bad, and cheap too! (A$8.00 per person).
• The Meat Pie Van (front of GPO, Franklin St, evenings only). Cheap but good place to get a meal especially when working late. Try their floater! (A$8.00 per person).
• Gelatissimo. Great gelato and coffee here. (A$5.00 for a scoop).
• Brunelli. Food is great. Try the salads, pizzas and pasta. You can get movie tickets here at great discount. (A$20.00 per person).

Halal Dining Places: there's only a few of them in Adelaide, and here's some that I know.

• Horus, Hindley St (near the west end). Owned by Egyptians. Great beef, lamb and chicken yiros and kebabs. Also a place to try out shisha (A$11.00 per person).
• Swinging Bowl, Stephens Place, Rundle Mall. Good Malaysian food. They've got roti here. (A$8.00 per person; discounts if you show your student ID).
• Nando's. A CMU student's favorite. Try any of the chicken dishes. Their chips aren't so bad too. (A$20.00 per person; cheaper if you order whole chicken and share).

Real Spring!

It's finally getting sunny in Adelaide. Today is my third day of going out without having to wear heavy winter clothes, including thermal undergarments. The wind can still be cold especially at night, but not as chilly as before. The sun now sets at about 7:30 pm and this gets a bit longer every day -- the change is noticeable. The rains have stopped, too.

The good thing is that the longer daylight psychologically allows me to work more. Darkness somehow signals for me to slow down. The bad thing is that I tend to abuse this to the point of exhaustion.

The problem now is that the sun is getting hotter. We are not yet into summer so consider how hot it could get in summer. Oh well, you can't win everything.

The SA State Library

Today I was finally able to visit the State Library of South Australia. I was excited about this visit and I was not disappointed.

Apart from the vast collection of books, it is very spacious, has nice air conditioning and has free wifi. It is open from 10 am to 8 pm (Mon-Wed) and 10 am to 6 pm on Thu-Fri. You can check out the updated schedule here.

There is plenty of space to study or work, with lots of comfortable seats. If you bring a laptop, you can plug into many of the sockets and use the free wifi. Membership is free for residents (just bring a proof of residence, like a phone bill). Being a member gives you internet access to extensive databases of publications and journals (like EBSCO).

I was happy to discover another treasure in Adelaide, but at the same time, sad too. It presented a bleeding contrast to our libraries in the Philippines. I was once a cultural researcher working for the Philippine government. Part of our project involved photo-documentation of historical records and books.

We were given access to the Katipunan files of the National Library and I was elated to be able to see newspapers such as La Independencia. When we tried opening the papers (sealed in crumbling, brown, dusty paper) I began to get sad. The librarian had warned us that they had no money to preserve the artifacts in climate controlled rooms. We persisted in turning a page but the paper started crumbling to pieces. We decided to stop our mission and just take a photo of the battered front page of the paper on top of the pile.

* * *
To use the wifi, just connect to Internode and start the browser. When you try to connect to a site, it will display a login page. Scroll to the lower portion of the page and click the Guest button.

Student Friendly Adelaide

Another thing I like about the City of Adelaide is that it is very friendly to students. Its city library, which I wrote about in a previous entry,  is very accessible and has a fairly good collection. It promotes concession (or student discount) tickets not just for transportation, but also in cultural events. 

Here's another pleasant surprise we got recently. My wife and I watched Angels & Demons last Thursday and the attendant at the box office charged me only A$6. She said students get to pay a bigger discount in the whole month of May! 

Typically, watching a movie in Palace Cinemas in Adelaide costs about A$12-20. There are also the annual French and Spanish film festivals -- but unlike in the Philippines, these ones in Adelaide aren't free. 

Microfinance, Social Capital and Gender Equality

This is the paper on microfinance and poverty that I wrote to complete my course in Economics of Development, taught by Mark Wessel. Thanks to Mark's guidance, I gained a deeper understanding on poverty, inequality and its relation with the financial system. Some of my friends interested in microfinance asked me to share it with them, so I'm putting the file up for download.

Yunus has always been an inspiration to me, so when Mark required us to write a paper on a country and its economic issues, I seized on the chance to write a study on Bangladesh and microfinance. This is the result. If you use the paper, kindly link back to this URL. If you like or dislike the paper, please post a comment.

This paper aims to understand poverty from the framework of development economics, using Bangladesh as a focal case study. We will do this by answering the following questions:

1. What economic and social factors contribute to inequality and poverty in Bangladesh?
2. What specific issues did microcredit address in Bangladesh that the formal financial system did not?
3. What lessons can be drawn from the experience of microfinance as a tool for alleviating poverty?
   

Read or download file at Scribd.

Thinking Micro: Poverty Alleviation through Microfinance, Social Capital and 
Gender Equality in Bangladesh by Ruben Canlas Jr is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

Adelaide City Library

Yesterday, I finally had my membership activated at the Adelaide City Library, and I am very happy I did it. I signed up for the City Library during the Lord Mayor's welcome party for international students, but only had time to activate it yesterday.

All I needed to activate it were:

• An ID showing my date of birth (I used my Philippine driver's license; a passport will do nicely too).
• A letter addressed to my registered post address (I used my bank statement).

After that, all I had to do was use one of the computer terminals to search what I wanted. The CMU Australia library being limited, I needed an alternative to buying books. The City Library turned out to be a treasure trove of supplemental readings.

We can borrow up to 30 materials (if what I heard from the librarian is correct!). And you can have them for a month. Here are more fabulous discoveries about the City Library system. I am sure you guys from the First World have these amenities (the Philippines doesn't).

• Audio visual materials: aside from books, they have DVDs, CDs and other stuff you can borrow.
• Self checkout: bypass the librarian. Get the books (or library items) yourself, scan your ID barcode, then place the items on a platform that auto-detects the books (via RFID sticker in the books).  The machine prints a receipt and you can leave the library.
• Online catalog and reservation. Search the library collection via their website (available here). Request the items via the website and specify where you want to pick them up.
• Pickup. The City Library has various branches scattered across the city (mine is on Grote Street). If the book you need is in another place, you can request it online and they'll drop it off to the library branch you specify.
  
• Online renewal. If you want to renew a book, just go online and do so!
• Returning books after hours. To return books after office hours, just drop them off a slot. 

I've actually been burrowing and borrowing books I need for school. After that, I'll be borrowing non-fiction and fiction books I was thinking of buying. This saves me money!

Picking Up Data (Adelaide Airport)

My wife arrived this morning. I was happy, of course, and also stressed, since this was finals week. We had group project deadlines and my Database Management finals was at 6 PM. 

I needed the cheapest way to pick her up, but knowing she's been through at least 15 hours of travel, I didn't want to force her to take a bus on her way to the city. So here's what I did.

I took the J1 Bus from Currie Street. Any of the J Buses (J for "Jet") pass by the airport. Travel time was about 30 minutes. I arrived about an hour early, but that was okay. My wife's flight arrived about 15 minutes early too. 

While waiting, I asked the info booth about shuttle buses that may provide a cheaper alternative to taxis. Turned out there was such a thing called SkyLink and it only costs about A$5.50 per person. SkyLink has 25 designated drop off points, some of them right at hotel doorsteps. 

Our hostel was not listed, plus the next SkyLink shuttle would only be available until after an hour, so we just took a cab back to the city. It cost us less than A$15.00.

After that, we had breakfast at Zuma Cafe in Central Market and left my wife to sleep, while I went back to school to resume our group project and to review for our Database final exams.