Asian Adventure: Bangkok to Tokyo

As of yesterday, we’ve traded Bangkok for Tokyo.  The population of each city is around 13 million and both are large urban areas.  But we’ve gone from tropical heat (mid 90’s) and high humidity to emerging spring (temperatures in the high 60’s).  From palm trees and lush greenery to deciduous trees just beginning to leaf.  From loud traffic, thousands of motor scooters and much street activity in Bangkok to just cars and men hurrying along the street in dark suits.  Hard to believe, but Tokyo seems very quiet to me!  And very orderly and neat.  Everything worked upon arrival.  The six hour flight was smooth, the immigration process efficient, and the luggage arrival almost immediate.  We did have to open a few bags for customs inspection, but even that was fairly quick.

Our hotel is in a quiet area close to the U.S. Embassy (not planned) and our room quite large.  The hotel is a classic one and most would call the architecture dated, which it is, but so far the service and the food have been first rate.  As this is Japan, there is lots of bowing.  All the hotel staff bow several times when greeting you and then again after whatever conversation or request has been made.

It turns out that we are in Tokyo at just the right time for the cherry blossoms.  So this morning we headed via subway to the Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden.  Riding the subway requires both determination and patience.  Determination in the form of willingness to learn a new system that has many lines and unfamiliar names.  The names are also in English on the signs and maps, but still….  Patience to persist when the automatic ticket machine won’t take either your yen bill or your credit card.  The third time was a charm and we got our all-day 600 yen tickets.

The garden was lovely and the cherry trees as beautiful as promised.  There was a security line to get in checking bags for drinks as alcohol is not permitted, but it moved along.  We saw lots of Japanese families and office workers picnicking on the grass and, of course, everyone had a camera of some sort!

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After lunch at a small tapas restaurant where we enjoyed grilled swordfish with rice and a salad, we got back on the subway for a short ride to the stop for Meiji Jingu.  This is a Shinto shrine built in 1920, which houses the ashes of Emperor Meiji and Empress Shoken.  It’s in a lovely park with lots of trees and the entrance is marked by a series of very high stately wooden arches.  The shrine buildings themselves are rather spare and mostly the brown of the cedar, a sharp contrast to the bright red and gold used in some of the Chinese temples we visited in Vietnam.  We had fun watching two different bridal parties process through the courtyard on their way to the shrine, the brides both in white and their attendants in lovely kimonos.

Bangkok Footnote

On our last day in Bangkok, we spent the morning at the Science Centre for Education.  This is a complex of six buildings which provides science learning opportunities and events for children in Bangkok and also from the rest of Thailand.  They see around 2 million students each year and offer science labs, science camps, science festivals, and teacher training in addition to 8 floors of museum exhibits and a planetarium.  They also have an extensive traveling outreach program which features three buses:  a planetarium bus, an astronomy bus and a biodiversity bus.  We were impressed!

Asian Adventure: Busy Bangkok

One could get the impression that Bangkok is only about traffic.  Both yesterday and today we have spent several hours getting to and from our hotel and the museums we visited.  With this stop, we are back to being official and no longer on vacation. There are good roads, elevated highways with 3 lanes in each direction snaking their way up the city scape, but there are lots and lots of cars! The taxis are easy to spot– in gumball colors: hot pink, intense orange, yellow yellow and even tomato red—they stand out midst the sea of gray, silver and white.  There are also two-tone taxis, green on the bottom and yellow on top, that are owned by the driver rather than by a company.  We haven’t taken a taxi here, but I had plenty of time to study them while we were in traffic.

Yesterday we spent the day with the folks at the National Science Museum (NSM)  located about our hour outside of Bangkok, but in the same province.  It’s a visually stunning building (pictured above) and is now just 15 years old.  The museum is state-owned and funded and is under the Ministry of Science and Technology.  It was established in 1995 and opened in 2000 and receives about 3 million visitors each year including their outreach effort.  Their science caravan which travels around the country to communities without science facilities visited 20 provinces last year and accounts for about 300,000 of the total visitorship.  In addition, they also have what they call national science popularization events such as the National Science and Technology Fair each August which draws about one million visitors to 120,000 square feet of displays. Their mission is to create “a scientific society for the sustainable development of the nation.”

There are six floors of exhibits in the NSM and we were impressed with both its size of the museum and the exhibits they have created.

Quality of Life exhibit
Quality of Life exhibit
Part of Robot Exhibit
Part of Robot Exhibit

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Currently, the museum leadership is working on its strategy for the next five years beginning in 2016 and so welcomed the opportunity to hear from us about the re-invention of the California Academy of Sciences when it opened its new building in 2008.

The NSM in just one of several museums in the same large complex.  We also toured the Natural History Museum which presents Thailand’s biodiversity and history and opened in 2003.  It has about 9,000 square feet of exhibit space.  The Information Technology Museum, which just opened in May 2012, is the largest of the three museums and focuses on communication and language as well as the development of computer technology.  We were fascinated with some of the displays and could have spent the entire afternoon just there!

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Lucy
Lucy

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lastly, plans are underway for yet another museum, Rama IX Museum, which will take at least 3 years for construction and will be about 100,000 square feet in size.  As we understood it, this museum will present the concepts and methods of development favored by the King of Thailand and will raise public awareness of the importance of natural resources and ecosystems,  the interrelationships between humans and the natural world, and the scientific concepts and methods the King employs in his research and problem solving as they relate to ecosystems and humans throughout Thailand.  I have to admit this concept of a kingly museum is a bit foreign.  We also saw a huge portrait of the Thai royal princess in one of the museums, put up in honor of her forthcoming birthday, since she has been a strong supporter of their work.