Bangkok Riots

Hey everyone! Thought you might want an update on the situation in Bangkok. I know that I haven’t really talked about the past few weeks of school, but in light of the situation and the fact that we've just been lesson planning the past few weeks anyway, I think I should skip that and head straight to the good stuff.

So the protests started to get worse the past few weeks, with attacks and incidents happening mostly on the weekends. The rumor is that this is because the red shirts wanted the press, but nobody wanted to affect the regular work week, so attacks would flare up Friday and Saturday nights and then calm down by Monday. They got really bad starting this past Thursday night in Lumphini Park when a sniper shot one of the red shirt generals, Seh Daeng. There were a lot of people injured in attacks that night, and schools and the BTS (sky train) were closed the next day. Which was news to me because I tried to take the BTS and it decided to dump us all off halfway to the school and close down, which meant I had to trudge through areas of town that I would rather not have been in until I could finally find a motorcycle to take me to an area where I could hop in a cab. I found a cab to take me to my school and when I got there, two hours later (but only ten minutes late), the principal said school was closed and we could all go home. After all that. So we left and took cabs home. And school has been closed ever since. We were supposed to start on Monday with the regular school year schedule, as were most schools in Bangkok. That didn’t happen.

Friday my roommates and I started hearing the gunshots and grenades in the early evening. We didn’t really know what was going on in our area, though we knew the protests had started getting ugly again. We started following CNN and the Twitter accounts of reporters to figure out what was going on, and heard that the riots were flaring up on a few streets near us. We spent the night watching from our balcony as gunshots went off in several different areas around us. Since our apartment is on the 16th floor we have a really good view of the city, and noise carries up to us from several different areas, though it was difficult to tell how close everything was to us. We learned that most of the action was happening at Sala Daeng and Silom, an area of town that was at least twenty minutes away from us and that we couldn’t actually see from our balcony. However, red shirts had also spread to areas near us like Din Daeng and Rajaprarop.

The next morning everything seemed calmer and since I didn’t hear any gunshots, I caught a cab to my dad’s hotel. Something I'm sure reassures everyone who is reading this, but really the gunshots hadn't been on our street and at that point our street was still open, so I didn't see the problem in leaving. By the way, my dad’s here! He and Dawn flew in Friday night so I didn’t get to see them till Saturday morning, but I was super excited to see them. Anyway, we took a tour of the Grand Palace. Even though it was my third time there, my father still insisted on getting a tour guide. What can you do? So the Grand Palace was wonderful for the third time around, and I actually learned a little bit about it that I didn’t know before, mostly that my guide is a yellow shirt and vehemently opposes the red shirts, but also a few things about the Grand Palace as well.

After that, we hopped the ferry back to the Navalai, where my dad and Dawn were staying, and grabbed lunch on their street. We took a nice, leisurely afternoon swim and hung out around the pool, not a care in the world. In the evening we decided to go see Wat Arun, the Temple of Dawn, because even though it’s the Temple of Dawn, it’s supposed to be really pretty in the evening.

As we were on the way, my roommate Holly called. “Don’t go back to the apartment,” she said. “It’s in a live fire zone.”

I didn’t really know what to make of that so I told her I wouldn’t go back. She and Kristina were at their school with their boss, who had informed them that all of a sudden the riots had entered our neighborhood and it wasn’t safe for us to go home. We got to Wat Arun and climbed up it (you can basically climb any relics you want in Southeast Asia- I love it), and I could see the smoke pouring into the air from way too close to our neighborhood. The black smoke from tires. The same black smoke that has been all over CNN and BBC for the past week and that I’m sure you’ve all seen if you’ve been paying attention to the news because it’s the most obvious sign of the turbulence in Bangkok.

At that point, I figured none of us were making it home that night. I went to dinner with my dad and Dawn at a Thai restaurant and then Holly and Kristina met up with us. My dad basically saved the day by getting us a room at the Navalai so we wouldn’t be homeless, and we ended up staying there Sunday night too because the live fire ban still hadn’t been lifted from our neighborhood.

Sunday we had free breakfast (which we were all super excited about because we never get free breakfast), and then we went on a boat tour. The tour took us through the canals of Bangkok to an orchid farm, which was absolutely gorgeous. Somehow they’ve figured out how to grow orchids so that the roots hang down from baskets, but they aren’t actually in soil or anything. Some of them grow out of coconuts. It’s really fascinating. Orchids are some of the hardest plants to grow, but Thailand can make anything grow- the weather here is amazing like that.

Anyway we got back from the tour and discovered that we still couldn’t get back into our neighborhood, so we decided to stay at the Navalai for another night until we could figure out what to do. Not that staying at the Navalai was a hardship, mind you- it was absolutely gorgeous there and we got tons of TV channels and nice beds to sleep in, so we were getting star treatment. It was almost worth Bangkok trying to blow itself up. Okay not at all, but it wasn't a bad way to pass two nights.

Sunday night, my dad and Dawn's last night in Bangkok before they left for Chiang Mai, we went on a dinner cruise through the Chao Praya River. The dinner was amazing. It was doubly amazing because it was our second buffet of the day, and since I hadn’t really had a buffet ever in Thailand before my dad came along, I was pretty psyched about it. This particular buffet involved a strange mixture of Thai, Indian, Japanese, and Western cuisine. I came back to the table with a plate of spaghetti, French fries, na’an, fried rice, and sushi. After that and an amazing flan dessert, we made our way to the top of the boat and just watched the lights go by as the ship sailed lazily along the river. It was easy to forget what was going on in Bangkok, even though we had witnessed a lot of it Friday night.

That seems to be the general consensus around Bangkok, at least early in the week. Everyone was aware of the violence, but in the areas it didn't touch, people went about their daily lives as if nothing was wrong. In the areas it did touch, everything closed and people couldn't even leave their homes. It was quite the contrast.

Monday morning we woke up and got our free breakfast, of course. Bangkok is divided and partially on fire and there are grenades and gunfire going off in the city, but the first thing we did before dealing with any of that was to get our free breakfast. I mean, it's free breakfast. Then came our choice. There was a lull in the fighting. We called the front desk at our building and they told us that Rangnam Road, close to where we live, was closed off to traffic but that it had been quiet all morning and if we left soon we could make it there. Normally we probably wouldn’t have made the attempt to get into our apartment through a live fire zone. But we’re girls. And you must keep in mind that we didn’t know we weren’t going to be able to return to our apartment. I left on Saturday to visit my dad and Holly and Kristina left to go to the gym. None of us knew that we wouldn't be returning later that day. Thus we’d been wearing the same clothes for three days. We were in desperate need of contact solution, clean underwear, and other feminine things. So we decided to make the trek to our apartment.

The trip to the apartment involved convincing a cab driver that it was okay to take us as close as possible to Rangnam Road because we lived there. He tried to tell us we didn’t want to go down Rangnam, but we insisted. So he drove us to the barbed wire that crossed the road and kept out the cars, and that was as far as he could go. We walked down a few back roads, ran to the only remaining ATM open on the street, and then ducked safely into our apartment without any incident. The only thing we really saw on the way were guards looking wary, though not wary at us. Most people who saw us on Rangnam probably thought we were stupid foreigners who had no idea what was going on. I didn’t blame them- it was an entirely vain move to go back to the apartment, though one that proved to be safe.

Once back at the apartment, of course the gunshots started up again and it quickly became unsafe for us to leave. We took a quick vote. I was in favor of leaving as soon as possible. Holly wanted to wait it out in the building. Kristina fell somewhere in the middle. We questioned the staff in the apartment building to find out how many residents would be there, figured out that the restaurant and the convenience store downstairs were both open, and while we were trying to find other places to stay, realized that there were less and less safe places in Bangkok. Even though we knew our neighborhood wasn’t particularly safe, our building itself was- we had security guards, we lived on the 16th floor, we had strong locks, and we had a front desk staff who knew who we were and who would take care of us if anything happened. We could have left and gone to a safer area, but no guesthouses in Bangkok have as good of security as our apartment building and we likely wouldn’t have had constant internet access. It would have been hard to know whether that safe area would turn unsafe, and if it did, we would be much more inconvenienced than if we just stayed in our own building. So we decided to stay.

Another factor in the decision to not leave Bangkok completely was that we weren't really sure when we would have to work again. My agency originally told me at the beginning of the week that I may have to work sometime at the end of the week, even though the school year was delayed for students until the following week. My roommates' boss told them they had the whole week off, but we still weren't sure the whole situation wouldn't blow over and schools would then be able to start earlier. So that was one of the main reasons that we didn't hop on the next plane out of Bangkok.

I stayed until Wednesday. And believe me I was getting stir crazy by then so I can only imagine how my roommates felt. We watched CNN. We listened to the explosions and gunshots outside. We slept in the same room away from the windows at night, even though it was highly unlikely that any of the violence would affect us. And we watched the black tire smoke pour through the city streets. Though CNN and BBC have greatly exaggerated many of the events in Bangkok, there was a lot of smoke. I'll give them that.

We ate all our meals at the Vietnamese restaurant downstairs and visited the convenience store lady, who clearly lived in the building, at least once a day to stock up on junk food and beer. We played Yahtzee. We watched movies. We did what we could to block out the sounds going on outside, except for when we were trying to figure out what in the world was going on. Every now and then we would hear banging that didn’t sound like any kind of fighting, and then we would go on Twitter, still the best way to get information fast, and see if anyone had updated anything about Rangnam. Sometimes they had, but usually the noises went without being described and we didn’t know what they were. Many of them came from Din Daeng, a long road about three streets over from us where much of the fighting was going on, though it wasn’t the worst area by far in Bangkok. Even though Rangnam was closed down, most of the fighting never really touched it- everything seemed to happen close by and Rangnam was just a road that happened to be in the center. Like the eye of the storm. Which was a fascinating place for us to be because we got to watch and experience a lot of what happened firsthand but from as safe a distance as possible.

Tuesday we found out that the government had declared the rest of the week a national holiday. That meant no school till Monday. So I decided to move up my flight. I was previously planning to visit my dad and Dawn in Koh Samui Friday night till Sunday afternoon, assuming of course that I would have school. This was before everyone in Bangkok decided to start blowing things up. I changed the flight to Wednesday and hoped that I would be able to make it out Wednesday morning before things got really bad. Usually there was a lull in the mornings- we assumed the government and the red shirts tried to grab a few hours of sleep in there.
Sure enough, Wednesday morning proved fairly safe in our area. Which was good because even as I was preparing to slip out, tanks were rolling into other areas of town. Thank goodness they hadn’t touched our area as I was leaving because things would have been much worse and it would have been a lot harder for me to leave. As it was, my escape from the apartment involved a few James Bond maneuvers.

We went out the back way through the parking lot to this random little road that we had never known existed behind the apartment building. One of the women who works at the desk showed us which direction to walk in and I found a motorcycle driver. The woman from the desk helped me explain that I needed to get to where I could take a taxi to the airport, but because it wasn’t safe to walk through Rangnam I wanted to take a motorcycle. The driver agreed and I hopped on. We zoomed through the back road to Victory Monument, where a small group of red shirts was already gathering. Since being displaced from their main protest site by the government, red shirts had been gathering in groups all over the city, and Victory Monument was becoming one of them. A lot of the lanes were closed due to people just parking their cars there and leaving them. But it didn’t look like anything had started up again- someone was speaking to the gathering crowd through a megaphone, but there was no violence that I saw. We scooted around in one of the lanes that was still open and found a cab. My driver explained to the cab driver what I wanted, and then I paid the motorcycle driver and slipped from the back of the motorcycle into the cab. We cruised to the airport- there was no traffic since everyone was staying inside at this point.

I had a few hours to kill at the airport but wanted to get there early because it was easier to get out of my apartment that way. So I just wandered around, ate at Dunkin Donuts, walked through a bookstore, and basically enjoyed the fact that I wasn’t looking at the walls inside my apartment anymore. The flight to Koh Samui was easy and quick, and the airport was open and refreshing. I waited for my dad and Dawn for about an hour till their flight from Chiang Mai landed and then we took a cab together to our hotel. We changed and went down to the ocean, which was about the best feeling ever after everything that happened in Bangkok.

I’ll do a separate post to update you on all of our adventures in Koh Samui since I want this post to be more about what’s happening in Bangkok right now. But I will say that being in Koh Samui really feels strange to me. It’s like a different part of Thailand. There are no politics here. There’s nobody walking around in certain colored T shirts and there are no gunshots at night. It’s completely detached from what’s going on, which is both wonderful and a little scary at the same time that so much could be going on in one part of the country and it could affect this area so little. I’ve been keeping in touch with my roommates every day- they’re bored but still completely fine, nothing has happened. There’s now a curfew imposed every night in Bangkok until Sunday, which really sucks for some people but doesn’t really affect my roommates since they can’t leave the apartment that much anyway.

I will say that it does seem like the protests are at least headed towards an end at this point. The government is taking more action than they have taken before, and they are clearing out some of the protest areas. The red shirt leaders, at least most of them, have surrendered and there are still a lot of radical groups of red shirts running around the city but they seem less organized and scattered, so hopefully the situation will be brought under control soon. The government stopped the curfew on Sunday so it seems as if they are hoping everyone will be able to go back to a regular work week next week after basically shutting the city down this week. I hope so too. The riots have been terrible for the economy. Not to mention the fact that the more days my kindergartners have off, the more wound up they’ll be when we finally start school. Here I go looking at the big picture again, I know.

Anyway just wanted to post this update on the situation and let everyone know what’s going on and that it seems like things are going to come to an end fairly soon. I’m safe in Koh Samui with my dad and Dawn, and tomorrow we’re going to hang out at the beach and it’s going to be lovely, so I’m excited. I hope you’re all doing well at home and I love and miss you all!

Love from Koh Samui,

Monica