Blog for 2009-06-21

From BiodivBorneo09

My weekend at Kota Kinabalu

Today was the rest day at Kota Kinabalu, but we have a lecture in the afternoon. In the morning, there is a Sunday market behind our hotel, and there was no reason to skip that to buy some souvenirs for my friends and family. The market is similar with the one in Indonesia, but the price is more expensive. After had a shopping time, I spent my time waiting for the lecture time with reading and try to review liana’s group (Molly, Douwe, and Andrew) report on the wiki.

There were two lectures which started at about 4 PM. First, Rahimatsah AMAT was shared about WWF program in Sabah in regard to conservation and development in Sabah. Hopefully, me and all the Harvard Biodiversity of Borneo students can help in some ways to stop the degradation of the planet’s natural environment and somehow could build a future in which humans live in harmony with nature, as well as the mission of WWF. Marc Arcernoz presented many beautiful pictures on his presentation called “Integrated approaches to wildlife conservation in Sabah-Malaysia”. Some of the pictures that very fascinating were the 8 species of hornbill in Borneo and also the kingfisher, very subjective according to my birdwatching hobby. Marc also shared his experience in researching rhinos, Asian elephant, and orang utan. He has a nice and clear France accent when presenting his slides in English, keep me focus to the topic.

Dinner time was a great moment to end the weekend in KK. Most of the students went out to the Filipino market, hunting for seafood. I’m decided to continue this nice evening with hang around the city with Aywen, Mindy, Fae, Le, Sreekar, Agri, and Serena. Aywen rent a car, so we can went around the city and then stopped by at 1Borneo mall. The unforgettable moment was eating sushi at sushi KING, which have been my first time to eating sushi in Japanese restaurant (poor me….). I went back to the hotel at 11 PM, feeling right because decided not to have one more round going around the city. It was a great weekend after all, and kind of ruined up because packing things =(