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.
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!
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.
