The Canberra Survival Guide

Nobody tells you the useful things. The university sends you a handbook about academic integrity and a map of the campus, and then you land, and it is a Sunday, and everything is shut, and you did not know that everything is shut on Sunday. This page is the thing I wish someone had emailed me.

It is not a tourism page. There is nothing here about hot air balloons or the War Memorial. It is the practical, unglamorous, slightly annoyed advice you would get from someone a year ahead of you, over a bad coffee, in a corridor.

Contents

• Eating — restaurants, campus food, and where to buy groceries
• Paperwork — the transport card, the SIM, getting in from the airport
• Traps — renting sight-unseen, bad meals, and a wasted Saturday

Where this comes from

Almost everything a new Chinese student learns about Canberra arrives through Xiaohongshu, one post at a time, in no order, mixed in with posts about somewhere else entirely. This guide is that material collected and sorted into pages you can actually navigate.

It is second-hand, and it says so on every page. Where a claim is first-hand, it is marked. Where it is somebody else's dinner, it is not dressed up as mine. That distinction costs nothing to make and almost no food content online bothers to make it.

Prices and opening hours move constantly. At least one of the widely-shared summaries this draws on was itself machine-generated from other posts. Treat every number here as a reason to check, not as the answer.

Why this page looks like 1996

Because guides like this used to be the entire point of the web. Before the platforms, somebody who had worked something out would write it on a page on a university server, link to the other pages worth reading, and put a date at the bottom so you knew how stale it was. Other people found it. That was the system.

That page is mostly gone, replaced by videos with sponsors and posts shaped for a feed. So this one is built the old way on purpose: no JavaScript, no images, no tracking, two files, and a date at the bottom. It loads instantly on campus wifi, which is the only performance benchmark that has ever really mattered.