(U)TP #atozchallenge

A J

April 24

UTP refers to my alma mater Universiti Teknologi Petronas. I attended 20 years ago when it was a fledgling university and I was among the first batch to graduate. My graduating class had about 200 students from various faculties and I knew most of them.

Ending up in UTP was never the plan, in fact, the route to reach there was circuitous and deflating. Long story short, my friends and I were government scholars with a path towards the UK to further our studies. However, due to the Asian financial crisis that hit at the exact moment we were to leave, the government changed the terms of our scholarship and we had to continue our studies locally. UTP became the destination for those of us majoring in engineering.

Though I hated it at first (it was a 3-4 hour drive one way and it was literally located in the boondocks because the university chose an undeveloped area to set up the campus), the 3 or so years I spent there gifted me with precious and long-lasting memories, among them:

On weekends when I didn't make the long drive back home, I had a chance to explore the surrounding sites especially Gua Tempurung or the Tempurung Caves, limestone caves which is estimated to be about 400 million years old. The last time my friends and I toured the cave, we decided to do the Grand Tour which took almost 4 hours! By the time we emerged, we looked like wet rats because we had to wade through some pools.
I learnt to play gamelan as it was the only extra-curricular activity that I was even slightly drawn to. Though it wasn't mandatory to sign up for any extra-curricular activity, the time after classes would sometimes drag on. To break the monotony of just going for lectures than back to the dorms for homework and studies, I thought it was a good idea to learn a new instrument. I'm glad I did and our troupe worked so well together, we even performed in several concerts on-campus.
I made a forever friend. We knew each other since our A-level days but we had other friends serving as buffers so I knew her superficially. When the both of us ended up in UTP and had to choose a roommate, we sort of reluctantly chose each other because better the strangers we knew, then the ones we didn't. The first few months of being roommates were not rosy because we were opposites in character and we fought a lot. By some miracle, we figured each other out eventually and are still fairly close now, 20-something years later.

A super-grainy photo of me playing the bonang barong, one of the instruments in a gamelan ensemble. I'm the one in peach, on the left. The girl on the right was a self-confessed super-achiever and always tried to steal the show LOL