Myanmar official visit ( SATREPS Workshop and field survey) - Day 1 (17-August-2015)

Hello everyone. I'm Seemanta (サム). I'm a first year PhD student. For those of you who are curious, yes I'm the one in the light blue shirt (cropped image, left bottom).

This is my first blog. I'll try to be as descriptive, and yet precise, as possible.
This is also the first blog of our group in English!

I'll write about my first trip to Myanmar (17-25 August, 2015).

Day 1 (17 - August)

The day started with heavy rainfall in Tokyo. Due to bad weather conditions, unfortunately our flight was delayed by 1 hr.

Flight delayed due to poor weather conditions.

I took the window seat (21K). Once out of Tokyo, the weather was really nice.

A view from my window.

After almost 6 and half hours, we finally arrived at Yangon International Airport (16:30 Local time).

The first thing we had to do was to get our VISA on arrival. The VISA on-arrival queue was not very long. We got our VISA stamped and we were officially in Yangon, Myanmar.

And here we were, waiting for our taxies to go to Yangon Technological University (YTU). It was raining at Yangon. And yes, I was the photographer.

We hopped into 2 taxies and headed to Yangon Technological University (YTU). The busy roads of Yangon somehow reminded me of my city's traffic. It was, in a way, a very similar scene.

After around 15 mins, we reached YTU. At YTU, Dr. Win Win Zin (Associate professor at YTU) was waiting to recieve us. We had a brief self introduction (for new members, like me) and a short meeting with Dr. Khin Than Yu (Pro-Rector, YTU) regarding the workshop to be held on 18-19 August 2015.

Brief meeting with the Pro-Rector, YTU

We were then escorted to the conference hall, where the workshop will be held.

Preparation for the workshop

After checking the conference hall, we headed back to our hotel, only to have one more final meeting for the day (to summarize and distribute tasks/roles among us).

Finally after another one and half hours of intense discussion, we had our first meal in Myanmar (at the hotel restaurant, ofcourse).

Finally some happy (and tired) faces after dinner!

And then we all decided to take some well needed rest. After all we had a big day ahead! All of us were very optimistic about the workshop.