I flew on NokAir, an LCC, for the first time. NokAir is a Thai domestic airline with impressive painted bird faces.
Mr. BS, a physics teacher, and Mr. Y, a chemistry teacher, met me at the airport. Both of them are young high school teachers.
The university has arranged accommodation for me at the Core Hotel near the main gate of university, which seems to be a 4-star hotel, but the hot water for the shower stopped running a few days ago. I am going to tell the front desk today. It would be very helpful to have a refrigerator in the room.
It is a luxury hotel, but I had to ask the front desk to heat the water in the microwave oven, and the hot water stopped running a few days ago. However, I can't complain too much because the university pays all the expenses for my stay.
Breakfast at the hotel is sometimes a buffet, and when there are few guests, An Indian staff makes the omelet in the photo. I have it every morning on a piece of bread.
This is the main entrance of Chaing Mai University Demonstration School. The school building on the right is the junior high school, and the front is a classroom for the SciUS course. Students in the SciUS course receive a scholarship and their basic living expenses and tuition fees are free. The student dormitory is located about 5 km away on another campus, which includes the Faculty of Agriculture. Free buses go to and from the dormitories. The person standing is Mr. B, a physics teacher.
Is this another entrance? Standing there is Ms. M, a biology teacher.
This is the physics classroom where the SciUS course is being taught. I remember I did this class in the third year of my high school life long time ago. It is quite an advanced subject.
What impressed me in this physics class was that the mechanics experiments were conducted properly, as you can see. This may seem simple, but it seems to be very difficult to conduct such experiments in ordinary high schools nowadays.
As you can see, the university campus is filled with motorcycles. In Japan, people use bicycles, but in this country, where it is hot all year round, motorcycles are the norm. During the evening rush hour, the campus is extremely crowded with cars and motorcycles both inside and outside the university. I am always impressed by the fact that they rarely honk their horns even in traffic jams, which is a characteristic of this country. This is because everyone knows when to yield and when to be yielded to. I always think that Japanese people cannot behave this. It would be perfect if they would yield the right of way to pedestrians at crosswalks.
One day we have lunch at the university restaurant. I am eating thick fried noodles, similar to Pad Thai, but slightly different. It's like a "kishimen" (flat noodle).
Most of the customers are students, and the restaurant has the atmosphere of a student town in Kyoto. We are about to order. They are young teachers, aren't they?
Ms. M, who took me to lunch, bought fried bananas for me. This was the late dinner of the day.
This is the restaurant he drove us to near the mountain on the other day. It is a very famous restaurant. The food was local and spicy, even for a seasoned cook like me. The rice is sticky rice, which is steamed glutinous rice.
The amount of food alone was quite large, but at the end of the meal, they ordered a huge bowl of shaved ice for dessert. Of course, I was allowed to eat it, too. But this was only for the men, the women were reserved. Did you notice the Japanese-style rugs on the tables?
In the evening, I was about to be dropped off at a dormitory on another campus, 5 km away from the Faculty of Agriculture, but the roads on campus were jammed. There is a traffic controller standing there to control the traffic, but there are so many motorcycles passing through. However, the good thing about Thailand is that there is almost no horn honking.
The SciUS course has a collaboration with the university, so we will visit the Geology Museum in the building and the rock garden outside.
This is the geological museum of the university's geology department. Students visited the museum on this day in collaboration with the university. After that, we went outside to the rodk garden with a professor of the university to explain about the rocks. However, while we were inside, it started to rain incredibly hard, so we had to postpone our observation in the rock garden for a while.
This is the rock garden at the preview on the previous day. The young chemistry teacher Y sensei is posing at the hammer. On the right is Mr. B, a physics teacher. There are many young teachers in this high school.
What caught my eye in the rock garden was this exquisite basalt with peridotite xenoliths. I used it to tell my students that although no one had ever seen it firsthand, the mantle is presumed to be composed of this peridotite.
This is a rock that shows a cutting relationship. The students were asked about the order of formation.
A university staff, who got PhD. in the U.S., explains in fluent English her specialty in structural geology, using a folded gneiss as an example.
This is a tourmaline-bearing rhyolite that the staff member told me about. This is the first time I have seen such rock.
However, the original schedule for this visit was changed and the arrival was moved a week earlier than originally planned, so the original flight was changed. This meant that my total stay in Thailand will exceeded the 30 days allowed for a non-visa enty. So I decided to extend my visa here in Chiang Mai. The immigration office at the airport was crowded, so I visited the immigration office in this department store in the city center.
This is the entrance to the immigration. Naturally, taking pictures is prohibited inside. It took about an hour to get from the line to the document check point, and another 30 minutes to submit the documents to the actual counter at the back of the line. All in all, it took more than two hours, but my colleague said it was still short. Sometimes the line did not end at 4:00 p.m., and it was carried over to the next day. I had heard rumors, but if you are going to apply for a visa in a foreign country, be careful. Still, I will be able to stay in Japan until October 5. Well, I will be back by then.
This is the first lesson for M6 (high school seniors), I believe. I'm talking to 60 students in a kind of hall. I talked about what science is and what geology is. The students seem to have a good command of English, and there was no translation into Thai.
As a continuation of this lesson, I have my students observe a thin slice of rock. I use a polarizing unit that I modified to fit on the stage of an ordinary microscope. I first explained to the students that they should look at it with their naked eye first, without using a smart phone.
Here is a story about an earthquake to M5 (high school sophomore). We are talking a little about active faults at Northern Thailand in order to do a fault experiment later.
Now, let me talk a little about the seismometer I sent there previously. This is a vertical seismograph with a broken acrylic plate. The cross-spring at the fulcrum is still alive, so it is still in good shape, but the package must have been handled very roughly. This is an emergency treatment by gluing the broken acrylic plate.
This is a horizontal pendulum with a broken thin phosphor bronze plate spring at the fulcrum. I happened to find a replacement among the parts I had sent to the previous university, so I took care of this one as well.
I was able to repair it in a corner of the chemistry teacher's room. The brown bottle is acrylic glue. I brought a lot of tools with me, but what I lacked, I borrowed from here. They have even a bench drill in their factory. This is a very good environment for a science high school.
These are the parts sent to us. The neodymium magnets and the ± power supply for the OP amplifier were purchased from LAZADA already.
Vertical seismograph that I managed to repair. You can see the power supply for the amplifier that I got from this school. Since I brought half of the tools with me, my suitcase always weighs less than 25kg, so it is very heavy.
The horizontal seismograph is now working smoothly. One
of the two seismometers, however, produces only a weak output, probably
due to a broken coil or a short circuit. I have no chance to repair it.
This is the seismograph that finally became able to display on the screen, thanks to the repair work. However, as usual, there were a series of difficulties in getting to this point. For some reason, the used PC could not run the programming language "Processing" properly, and when we checked, we found that the OS Windows was 32 bits. The PC was not on the campus of the high school where I teach, but in a student dormitory on the campus of the Faculty of Agriculture, 5 kilometers away. It was only last night, just a few days before the schedule. However, as you can see, the purple signal was so weak that it could not detect the ground motion sufficiently. We had no choice but to leave it there as time was running out.
It took two days to explain the treatment both hardware and software to the students. The time for both presentations was from 7:00 to 8:00 p.m. (since it was in a student dormitory), so I arrived back at the hotel after 9:00 p.m. <Overcrowded schedule>. I was satisfied if I could contribute to geoscience education here even if only a little. So I'm going to take a break now.
This is a picture of the fault experiment I did yesterday afternoon with 60 M5 students (2nd year high school students). This is probably the best result in the history of my fault experiment. Here are some photos and videos. This acrylic case was made by this high school using a laser cutter. It was very well done.
I made a video of the students carefully making the strata. I wish I could upload the whole video to YouTube. The acrylic case made with a laser cutter is also very nice.
The results of all the groups are shown below. It is very impressive. All the groups did such a good job of making the strata, that I would like to upload them to YouTube. The cocoa is the cheap stuff with a little bit of something else mixed in. I could have made a whole layer with this, but I have too poor mind and told them to drop it near the window only.
They pose as if they are taking a picture of their own face, but in fact the focus is only on the fault.
They enjoyed the three-and-a-half-hour long class, which started with seismic wave analysis and ended with a fault experiment.
I'll give you a picture of it. This is all the materials I brought in my suitcase. There are no tools in this suitcase. I am having a hard time keeping the weight of my suitcase down to 25 kg, which is not too expensive for checked baggage, because I don't want to cause too much trouble to the universities that invited me. JAL flights allow up to two suitcases weighing 23 kg each for a round-trip flight, but I have to do this because I have to take many domestic flights. In order to store them, I have sent all the souvenirs I received from the university to Japan by postal parcel because they are too bulky.
Dr. Burapha of the Department of Geology, Chiang Mai University guided us to a geological field trip around Chiang Mai. He explained that this is a small mountain called DoiNoi, which rises as an independent peak, and was raised as a result of strike-slip fault movement on the west side, called PopUp. There are several such faults around Chiang Mai that have been active until recently.
The second stop is MaeWang National Park, famous for its HooDoo. The HooDoo is a 5 million year old river bed formation. At first, we went down from the gazebo and looked around the strata along the valley first.
Outcrops of sand and gravel and silt layers. A sign explains the geology.
We are looking for gravel stones on the riverbanks.
Now the famous HooDoo is in sight. The cliffs are stunning and overwhelming.
It is composed of alternating layers of sand and gravel, and the gravel part seems to be a little darker and harder.
Next is a view of the erosion topography of the MaeKhan River. The trail we planned to visit was closed due to the rainy season. The muddy stream is swirling and flowing.
The oldest gneiss in Thailand, known as augen gneiss, is exposed here. It is evidence of rapid uplift caused by the collision of the Indian Plate. It was very interesting for me, but maybe a little difficult for the students who went with me.
