civic unrest

I wrote recently about the protesters who had set up camp near Phet's office demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra. Well, we had our first official experience with them ourselves this weekend.

We took Ji to see Eight Below at the fancy-schmancy Emporium shopping centre on Sunday. Figured it'd be good for him to get a dose of cold and snow since he keeps telling us he really misses winter. The movie was pretty good. Daring antarctic science expeditions! Sled dogs lost on their own for more than half a year! Terrifying leopard seals! When the movie was over we headed off. I was going to go to the post office a few skytrain stops away and Phet and Ji were going to cross over Sukhumvit Avenue and catch a cab home. When we tried to get through to the skytrain station, however, we were told that the entrance was closed. We were indignant -- who were the Emporium people to close an entrance to a public transit provider?

When we had arrived earlier at the Emporium it had looked like they were gearing up for a big VIP visit. There were metal blockades in front of the mall and many guards and policemen milling about. Phet got out of the cab and announed in Thai "We're here! The VIPs are here now!" to the amusement of about three guards. We had thought that maybe Thaksin was going to visit the mall and that the mall was anticipating protesters. But by the time we got out of our movie, the mall had gone into lock-down mode. But it was weird; people were still entering and exiting the mall but they had to do so from a single side entrance. All the front doors were chained shut. We were told by a very fancily-dressed greeter that the doors were shut but we couldn't see the chains and figured we could just push our way out, but noooo the doors really were l-o-c-k-e-d locked. When we irately asked the greeter where we could get out of the godforsaken mall she was pissed off and said in a loud voice, "I told you the doors were shut." Yeah, well...we're foreigners. We pretend we don't understand English...

We had to trek all the way to the back of the mall through (echh) the cosmetics section and we were grumpy by the time we finally got out into the Bangkok heat. There were tons of people milling up and down the street and Sukhumvit was totally crammed full of pedestrians holding up the traffic. The protesters were on the march! Lots of people were wearing yellow bandanas and the street was pulsing with shouts of "Thaksin! Aawk Bai!" (Thaksin, get out). Although Phet had planned to get a taxi, I told him I thought he'd be better off on the skytrain given how insane the traffic was. We started to make our way up the stairs to the train and I got steadily more and more freaked out by the crowd. All the people were cheerful and calm, but I have a huge terror of randomly-induced crowd crushings. Like, I don't have it in mind that anyone wants to bonk me on the head or scream at me, but I have a deep fear of the sudden spark that sends everyone running and ends up with me being trampled on the floor. The staircase was totally jammed and it took ages to get up just halfway, by which point three people had almost fallen down around (pregnant! with four year old!) me.

When we got up high enough we could see that the entrance to the skytrain would be impossible to get through. Where there might usually be 3 or 4 people waiting in line to get change there were crams of crowds 300 people thick. I told Phet we were going to have to walk part of the way home. So we set back down the stairs and then crossed over to the less crazy side of the street. One big bonus of the protesting was that we were able to walk casually across Sukhumvit without a care in the world. Once on the calmer side I took a biiiiig breath of relief and let my shoulders relax from where they'd been hunched up by my ears. We walked for about four blocks, slowly chilling out. It was pretty funny, really, cause we were both carrying knapsacks filled with movie theatre supplies - Phet had a king size bed blanket and I had my hooded sweatshirt and Ji's Maple Leafs jersey. And there we were, walking down Sukhumvit in the 35' March heat.

I read the paper today and it said the protesters had gotten people to meet at two major mall complexes because it would allow new protesters to join in and also because the protesters would have easier access to food, cool shelter, bathrooms, and transportation. Yeah, they would have if anyone had let them in. [Bangkok-27-March-2006]