field trip!

I'm lucky. Because my school only has 37 students, there's usually plenty of room left on the bus for an extra teacher who wants to tag along on a field trip. So this past Wednesday, I went with the 1st-4th grades to Chiba City, about an hour and a half away on the local roads we took. The first and second graders went to the Chiba Zoo (千葉市動物公園, Chiba-shi Dobutsu Koen)

I, however, went with the third and fourth graders to the prefectural police headquarters. We visiting a division called the 交通管制センター (kotsukansei senta, traffic control center). It was actually fairly impressive. They had a whole server farm supporting a system that tracks every traffic light at every intersection between state and national roads in the prefecture, and sensors at each intersection detect traffic jams at lengths from 100m to 1km. Here's a picture of the control room:


The left side of that wall is taken up by video monitors from around the prefecture. The control officer can switch around to appartently a couple hundred cameras. The big center panel is the traffic light observation system I described above. The panel on the upper far right monitors all the expressways in the prefecture, and on the lower far right is a video screen that can display whatever the officer on duty feels like. Traffic does suck in Chiba Prefecture, but apparently not for lack of effort on the part of the police.

Anyway, after our fun morning with the cops we went to the beautiful Port of Chiba (a rare English link) for a picnic lunch.


That's a fuel shipping terminal and a steel foundry behind the kids there. After lunch we went up a tower, not visible in the picture, for a "scenic" view. The air pollution was so thick that visibility was only 10-15km, from 300 feet up. Looking straight down, I could see parts of the harbor where the water was red. Seriously. So of course, we went out on a boat.


That's Yuusaku, one of my fourth graders. He was very excited. So jumpy and excited, in fact, that I spent most of our boat ride plotting which shore I would swim to in the event he (or any of the other boys) fell over the side and I had to jump in to get them. Though I also got to make myself useful by reading the names of the various vessels at port, and identifying their flags for the kids. The vessels were mostly large freighters, some bringing coal or fuel for the forges and refineries, others taking away finished steel beams. Lots of boats registered in Panama, followed by Vietnam, Singapore, the Philippines, and South Korea.

It was a fun day, but I fell asleep on the bus back to school. Field trips are exhausting.