The First Night in Pontianak

What a busy day. I had another chance to accompany Japanese scientists in a survey for 3 days. It would have been taken in another city which laid on the equator line, Pontianak. The purpose was to repair some troubles of Wind Profiler Radar at LAPAN site in the riverside city. Wind Profiler Radar (WPR) is an important instrument for us, meteorologist and some scientists, since it has abilities to measure the wind speed and direction at various elevation (height) above the ground. The data provided from WPR will give us some useful information to determine the phenomenon which has been occured in the atmosphere, such as MJO (Madden Julian Oscillation, Kelvin Wave etc.).

Speaking about the scientists ... ah, i forgot to tell you that there were two scientists whom i accompanied with. These two were quite different with the previous scientists i'd known. They were more serious and did not like to speak too much (especially in English ). One of them was Hiroyuki Hasiguchi-san, a scientist from Kyoto University and another one was Takao Nakagawa-san, an engineer of Sumitomo Electric Co.

Pontianak, a city surrounded with Kapuas River, the longest river in Indonesia, was remind me with towns of east borneo, since they were in the same island with this city. Because its location which was excactly on the equator line, the climate was quite hot, especially in the daytime. That's why this city was quite famous among the meteorologist which had long interest in tropical meteorology.

Supadio, the airport of Pontianak, was not as big as my hometown airport (Sepinggan), but it was big enough for mid-sized aircraft like Boeing 737 to land safely. There were some unique moments at the first time when i came to this city, especially about the toilet at the airport. It was very very small toilet. So, i think you can imagine what would happen when a small toilet's entered by a large number of people. Yes ... there would be a 'chaos' inside . I could even hear some people (male of course)whispered funny words like "Uwahhh ... uenak tenannn !!!" or "Duh, bakal seember nih yg keluar" during the 'process' at the toilet .

The LAPAN people in Pontianak were very friendly. I really impressed with a young man at LAPAN, who could speak Japanese fluently. Man ... i really felt like a dumb compared with him and because the japanese prefer to speak japanese, they really enjoyed talking with him. But it's OK ... nobody's perfect including me and we are friends (honestly, i also enjoyed talking with him ). It seemed that i had to learn much more about Japanese.