January 21, 2009
| We left Grand Forks on Wednesday the 21st; after 24 hours and plane changes in Minneapolis and Tokyo we arrived in Singapore (around midnight) where we spent the night in a hotel. We also ventured out and found a nearby Indian restaurant that was still open. The next morning we boarded our flight to Jakarta. |
We arrived in Jakarta Friday. Traffic is terrible! It took 1.5 hours to drive the 20 miles from the airport to our hotel. And that was not during rush hour. Here’s a picture of the traffic in front of our hotel. Once we got settled in, we headed off to a nearby mall to get something to eat and to see what was there. The mall was very busy and we were 2 of 3 foreigners in the entire mall. Everyone looked at use. I guess foreigners don’t wander through malls here.
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We didn’t get much done today. Tested the equipment, did some refinements on the SEMs website, struggled with network issues and went for a dip in the pool. Here’s a view of one of the built-up areas in Jakarta (there are several areas of these big buildings) from our hotel window. For dinner, we took a taxi to another mall (rather, mall area – several malls in one location). Unlike the first mall we went to, this was a very upscale area (malls had Gucci, etc) and only a few people even looked at us. We found one mall with many restaurants and ate at an Indonesian restaurant. We both had ox tail soup and fried ox tail (both were good) and another local somewhat spicy dish (also good). After dinner we went back to our hotel and found the hotel bar. The house band was very good and many patrons got up to sing - wow, were they (the patrons) good.
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Today is time to move to another hotel closer to the path of the eclipse. Before we left I took some pictures of the pool area at the Park Lane hotel.
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One the way out of town I took a few pictures from the taxi. Like many underdeveloped countries, the wealthy (note the picture of the condos) live alongside the poor (note the nearby shanty town).
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The big day. Unfortunately it started off by raining until noon and remained cloudy through much of the eclipse. We did set up (see left images) and did get some images (see right image) and even got some of the eclipse webcast. However, due to network problems our webcast didn’t last long. There just wasn’t enough bandwidth to produce a reasonable stream. We have been very lucky with weather and networks, so I can’t really complain too much.
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