Late morning I caught a cab over to BITEC. Actually, the 2nd cab I came across. The first cabbie was very nice and wanted to drive me and then suggested I pay him 300 baht to do so! Ha! Okay, I am no longer a stupid farang and know full well that on the meter, to BITEC was only going to be ~100 baht. Sorry buddy!! Go find another sucker. Turns out it was almost exactly 100 baht, plus the toll fee for the highway.
Walking into BITEC, I was completely SWARMED by kids!! 50,000 to 100,000 students go through the expo of the Science & Technology Fair every single day. Every day!! In 2 weeks, they get >1.3 MILLION visitors (mainly school groups) coming in to visit. From all over the country. Pichai was telling me that groups from far north and south will travel all night on the bus to get to Bangkok, visit the National Science Museum in the morning and then come to BITEC for the Sci&Tech Fair in the afternoon. Then drive back to wherever they came from over the next night! That's crazy. Can you imagine a school group from Canada doing that? It would be like driving from New Brunswick or PEI to Ottawa over night and then back again the next night! To attend a SCIENCE fair!! Incredible.
The Fair is actually an expo, not what we consider a 'science fair'. It has booths and displays and pavilions from private industry, government, universities, other museums and science centres, as well as international pavilions - this year from Germany, China, Russia, Japan and France.
The France pavilion was interesting as it actually represented a collaboration between Thai scientists and SOILEIL, the French synchrotron near Paris. The interesting thing I found out is that Thailand actually HAS a synchrotron souce! Check out the webpage for Siam Photon. I don't know who the scientists are, but I do know they have a crystallography line and an XAS line. Could be interesting and useful information.
Hopefully next year from Canada as well. We are working on an MOU between CMN and NSM and hopefully this will include our involvement in the Sci & Tech Fair next year.
I met up with the NSM staff - Bink, Thanakorn, Chanika and Cholawit - in the NSM office and then went to lunch with them where Pichai met us. It was nice to be back amongst people I know - to come all this way across the planet only to be met with colleagues and Thai friends. Pretty cool. They have done an amazing job at this expo - and have a huge amount of energy to survive for 2 weeks! After lunch, I was able to meet with Pichai, Bink and Thanakorn to discuss the MOU, catch up, and plan my trip to Chanthaburi next week. So far so good! Cholawit then showed me around 2 of the 5 halls of the expo before I started crashing at around 4pm. Jet-lag set in and there was no way I was going to visit the last few halls - we'll leave that until tomorrow!
After a quick recovery rest period at the hotel, I decided that heading to Ratchadamneon Stadium to buy gloves at Raja. Afterwards, I stopped in at the Issaan restaurant next door and had bbq chicken, som tam and sticky rice. But it was a bad chicken experience - still bleeding and cold. So I told the waitress and she took it back and I *think* she put it in a wok and fried it in oil to warm it up. Yuck. I got my bitten chicken chunks back and they were still oozing a bit of blood. Now, the fact that I am already on antibiotics doesn't mean I can play Russian roulette with sushi chicken! So I told her that I was not eating it. There was a farang guy in there who spoke Thai so I told him what was wrong and he translated. No chicken. They took it away, apologizing. So I finished the rice and som tam and am just getting ready to leave, when out comes the waitress with a plate of chicken!! The SAME friggin' chicken!!! Minus the few chewed pieces (except one leg which was what clued me in). No no no no!!! Okay, it was hot and finally cooked, but come on!! Thrice repeated chicken is not a lot of fun!! Nor appetizing. So if I get GI issues tonight, I know the cause...
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