catching up...part 1, Red Shirts

I last left off as the Red Shirt saga was starting to get heated...things eventually really out of hand. My neighborhood became a militarized zone...Lumpini Park became home to hundreds of protesters, surrounded by a ten-foot barricade made of tires and bamboo sticks, doused in something flammable...Sukhumvit, also shut down from one Central World to the other - protesters camped out with their families under the BTS tracks, sleeping on mats, hanging out their laundry, listening 24/7 to propaganda and sappy ballads broadcast over loudspeakers. The beginning of May marked the first clash, down by democracy monument, where i had first walked amongst thousands of protesters who believed they were there for freedom. People were killed, Khao San Rd. was trashed. i was a block away when the bomb was thrown onto Sala Daeng station. Central and Siam had closed their doors, and Thailand was losing an estimated U$100 million a day.

By mid-May, the showdown was getting really tense, the military was present everywhere, and a few days later, the city was completely shut down. No more BTS. nothing open -  no place to go, even if you wanted to. Curfews instilled - 9 pm, then 8 pm...and 3 pm in my neighborhood. Sathorn and Silom Roads, and Rama IV, were closed off. The red shirts raided a HOSPITAL, never thinking about what that meant...we could hear the gunshots all night... 3 days of this, and it didn't look like this was going to stop any time soon. 28 fires set in the city, including Central World. People were getting shot in the street...and since the main streets were shut down, protesters came through the sidestreets now, crammed into pickups, holding rifles...

All incited by a power-hungry egomaniac who deliberately put his own people's lives in danger for his own gain... and all because a government couldn't let U$20 million slide, chuck it to a loss in the murky waters of political laws... And while the people fought to get money promised to them by the government, it boggles the mind how they can't see that had their hero REALLY had their interest at heart, he would not have laundered the government money through his own party...

So after three days of camping in and sticking together as the world around us became a fight zone, Tanya, Lannie, and I headed to Pattaya, which yes, had 9 pm curfews, but thank goodness, was not nearly as tense as it bangkok.

And 4 days later, i headed to Germany for a little mini vacation, which i had already been planning...