St Paul School @ Brisbane

High school study exchange (2018) in Brisbane, Australia, with a focus on cross-cultural learning and foundation studies.

Somewhere Between Serpong, Perth, and Brisbane

Australia School Immersion Programme · Perth & Brisbane · 2017

February 2017, somewhere between Serpong, Perth, and Brisbane. I was still in high school when I joined a two-week school immersion programme in Australia. We spent the first half in Perth before flying across the country to Brisbane for another week. At the time, I mostly saw it as two weeks packed with classes, school visits, city trips, and a lot of things I had never done before. Years later, what I remember most are the smaller moments: trying to have a conversation with someone when neither of us spoke English as our first language, following another student’s timetable at a school I had never been to, seeing a ship being built next to the sea, and learning how to get around cities that looked nothing like Serpong. It was one of my earliest chances to see how differently everyday life could work somewhere else.

A Week in Perth

Perth was our first stop, and most of the first week revolved around an English programme at Phoenix Academy. Our classes were mixed with students from different countries, with quite a few coming from China and Japan. Most of the sessions were conversational, so rather than spending the entire time working through textbooks, we talked, worked on small activities, and were constantly asked to express our thoughts in English.

There was something interesting about having a room full of people trying to communicate in a language that belonged natively to none of us. Sometimes someone would miss a word, simplify a sentence, point at something, or simply rely on the other person’s expression to understand what they were trying to say. Somehow, the conversations kept going. That experience made language feel much more practical to me. Grammar obviously mattered, but in the room, the immediate question was whether the person across from you understood what you were trying to communicate.

My assessment from the programme came back at C1 CEFR. At the end of the classes, we took pictures, exchanged stories, and talked with our instructor outside the usual lessons. I remember finding out that he made music in his spare time, and surprisingly, the songs were actually good. It is a very random detail to remember almost a decade later, but somehow that is exactly the kind of thing that sticks.

Seeing How Things Are Made

The rest of Perth was filled with visits around the city. We went to universities, Fremantle Prison, different parts of Perth, and an industrial visit to Austal, where we saw the production facility and learned about different stages of ship manufacturing.

That visit stuck with me because, until then, I had never really thought about where ships were actually built. Seeing the production facility sitting right next to the water suddenly made the entire process feel obvious. Of course you build a ship next to the sea. Once it is completed, it can essentially go straight into the water. It was probably an incredibly ordinary observation for anyone working there, but as a high school student seeing the process for the first time, I found it fascinating.

There were several moments like that throughout the trip. Things I vaguely understood from books or television became much easier to remember once I could see where they happened and how they worked in real life.

Perth, in My Memory

My memory of Perth is mostly blue skies, dry heat, wide roads, and a lot of open space. It was summer and definitely hot, but the air was relatively dry. Most days were sunny enough that you immediately felt the heat once you stepped outside, although it was still surprisingly manageable.

We spent time around the city, Fremantle, Kings Park, and several educational and environmental sites throughout the week. The programme also included activities at SERCUL related to water ecosystems, while one of the English projects at Phoenix Academy had us interacting with students from countries including China, Japan, Korea, Uruguay, Colombia, Thailand, India, and several Pacific countries.

After roughly a week in Western Australia, we packed everything again and moved on to Brisbane.

Moving East

We flew from Perth to Brisbane on 29 January. The change in weather was one of the first things I noticed. Brisbane did not always seem dramatically hotter according to the temperature, but it felt hotter because the air was considerably more humid. After a week in Perth’s dry summer weather, the difference was immediate. You could walk outside and become sweaty much faster.

The cities themselves also felt different. Perth had felt spacious and relatively quiet, while Brisbane felt denser, greener, and more active. It was also in Brisbane that the school immersion became much more literal.

Becoming a St. Paul’s Student for a Few Days

Our mornings in Brisbane were spent at St. Paul’s School. Each of us received our own class schedule and was paired with a local student who became our buddy. Instead of moving around together as one visiting group, we followed their classes and moved through the school as part of their usual routine.

That setup made the experience much more interesting because there was no tour guide explaining every little difference between their school and ours. You figured things out by being there. Which classroom should I go to? How does this teacher run the class? What are the students talking about? When does everyone move? Where am I supposed to sit? For a few days, those became very normal questions.

My buddy became the person who helped bridge that gap. After a couple of days, the interactions started feeling much less formal. We talked about school, what life was like in Indonesia, what life was like in Australia, and all the small differences that were interesting precisely because they were completely ordinary to the other person. By the third day, the school itself had started feeling considerably less foreign, and the programme record also noted that students from both schools were becoming more comfortable with their respective buddies.

Brisbane Outside the School

The afternoons gave us another version of Brisbane. We walked around the CBD, Queen Street Mall, King George Square, and South Bank. We climbed Story Bridge and saw the city from above, and on another day we went up to Mt Coot-tha. During one of those days, the temperature reached around 39 degrees, which made exploring the city on foot considerably less appealing.

One of our last educational visits was to the University of Queensland. We were introduced to the university, toured its learning facilities, and saw its student accommodation. I was still several years away from university, so walking around an Australian campus made the idea of studying abroad much easier to picture. It became an actual place with classrooms, dormitories, students walking between buildings, and routines of its own.

The Last Day at St. Paul’s

Our immersion at St. Paul’s only lasted a few days. On the final morning, we went through our last classes and gathered again with the teachers and international programme coordinators. There were certificates, photos, and goodbyes, and everyone eventually said goodbye to their respective buddies before we continued with the rest of the itinerary.

It was short enough that I would hesitate to describe myself as having properly studied in Australia, but for those few days I did have a routine there. I would wake up, get ready, go to school, find my buddy, follow the timetable, figure things out as I went, come back, and do it again the next morning. Then, suddenly, it was over.