Monday, July 26, 2010

Just Another Monday

--- written on Monday, July 26, 2010 ----

The ESW blog is being updated! Go check it out at eswpadang.blogspot.com. We'll be making changes to the entries (adding links and pictures) as we go along.

Only one more month in Padang! Definitely going to miss this place. There are things I miss about the US and part of me wants to go back to “reality”. It seems so unreal that I'm sitting here in West Sumatra. I guess I've always wanted to go to Southeast Asia and here I am.

We started off the week with a huge rainstorm in the early mornings. Luckily, it wasn't raining anymore when we stepped out of the house. But the bus that we took decided to take some detour and then somehow missed the turn to go across the bridge. This bus is big so it had to make some hapzard backing up to get back onto the right road. We still manged to get to Andalas at a reasonable time for our meeting.

I finally got a tour of the Engineering Department today. We went to see the soils laboratory to see what kind of equipment they have. Hopefully, we will do some soil investigations next week. They seem to be pretty well equiped with hand equipment. No fancy computerized stuff, which is good for us actually. I wish I had done an internship at a small geotech firm where I got samples from the field and did lab tests on the samples. I think I know what the basic tests are but I've never done them more than once. If I had worked just one summer a small geotech firm, I would know exactly what kinds of tests I would and should do for this project. But since I don't have such experience, let's hope the geotech references I have on my compuer are good.

We went back to the construction site of a school again to see their progress. Short visit but very interesting stuff. One of the students who work at the construction clinic oversees the project on behalf of TB, the structural engineer who did the design for the rebuilding. I wish I have this kind of experience (overseeing construction). I would be able to learn so much more than sitting in a design office.

The construction site is very close to our place so we went back to our dorm to get our internet accounts set up (finally!!). We found the office where they do this kind of stuff. The door was closed so Andi tried to get the attention of the receptionist by looking through the window and knocking. But she ignored him so he got Greg to look through the window. This worked! The receptionist came to the door and opened it. So we finally signed up for an internet account at our place and then spent the rest of the afternoon discussing our plans for the next couple of weeks.

1 comment:

Yalu said...

Does this mean you'll start to have better Internet?