The Crisis Hits Home

I’ve written many times about various issues going on here in Thailand. The last several years have not been kind to the kingdom in terms of stability. When they’re not closing down airports they’re chasing ASEAN leaders from their hotel rooms. Red shirts (anti-government), yellow shirts (pro-government), whatever (everyone in between). There have been numerous rallies and such here in Bangkok and whenever people write to ask if it’s a total war zone I just laugh and say that they always do that stuff away from the tourist areas so you don’t even see it except for on the news.

Well, the red shirts brought their fight to me this weekend. To be more accurate they decided to stage a rally on my street. Since I am down the street from several major shopping complexes (Central World, Gaysorn Plaza, Amarin, and Siam Paragon) the red shirts figured that causing a little financial pinch by forcing these shopping centers to shut their doors fearing poor red-shirted farmers might start handling the Prada and Gucci products was in order.

Initial estimates are that shutting their doors will lead to about a 60 billion baht loss for merchants. That’s close to $2 billion USD so I have a feeling someone is inflating estimates a bit or someone was misquoted.

So, Saturday morning I woke up and my girlfriend came back from grabbing some noodles from a street vendor and said that the street was full of red shirts. I inhaled my noodles, grabbed my camera, and head out into the sea of red.

I was expecting what I had seen over the last several weeks. Most of the time the red shirts just parade through Bangkok and screw up traffic. Today they actually blockaded my street. They had their own security and there was no traffic running on Ratchadamri or on Phloen Chit, two fairly busy streets.

Though there were red shirts meandering around near my apartment I could tell that the real action was up the street. I walked up towards the Ratchadamri/Phloen Chit intersection and the crowds became more dense and the loudspeakers became louder.

Soon I was standing in a sea of red. As far up and down Phloen Chit all I could see was red. The streets had been closed and there was no traffic. An unusual sight considering this is usually a very busy intersection. It was rather strange to be able to just walk in the middle of such a major street. It sort of felt like a street fair.

They had erected a stage right dead in the center of the intersection and a speaker was whipping the crowd into a frenzy. The local press puts the number at around 10,000 people. I think that’s a fair count.

As I walked amongst the red shirts I took particular notice that there were hardly any farang (foreigners). I was one of just a few white faces in the sea of red shirts. Had I just made a horrible mistake?

I wasn’t sure what kind of reaction to expect from the crowd. Would they see me an intruder? Before the rallies began the local press made it sound like they were going to kill anybody who was not on their side. They warned of mass violence and possible actions against foreign interests. I happen to consider myself foreign and an interest so I was just a tad apprehensive.

I guess I shouldn’t have really worried. As I strolled around people smiled. They gave me thumbs ups, waves, offered me water, and many insisted that I take their picture. When I would whip out a little Thai on them they absolutely beamed with pride. Hardly the blood thirsty mob the local press had tried to scare everyone into thinking they were.

I think the funniest thing I saw was on Saturday, the first day of this weekend’s rallies. I was snapping some pics in front of Central World when I look up and see these two Japanese girls. Just the look on their face communicated that they had no clue what the hell was going on and were scared shitless. As soon as they saw me in the crowd they made a beeline to me and with map in hand asked if I know how to get to Siam Paragon. I wanted to laugh but decided to be nice. I told them how to get to Siam Paragon (not knowing myself that it was closed) and they disappeared.

I just couldn’t get this picture out of my head of two gals sitting there at breakfast all giddy thinking about all of the shopping they’re going to do in Bangkok and as they get near Gaysorn and Central World they’re saying to each other “Hey, is there a fair or something going on?” And then it slowly dawns on them that they’re in the middle of an anti-government protest.

After I got back home I downloaded the pics to my computer. I have Image Capture on my Mac set up to download the pics and then delete them off of the camera. After downloading I went to preview my pics but about 80% or so ended up being corrupted. F*ck!!!!!

So when I got up Sunday morning and heard the loudspeakers I got excited. I checked the Bangkok Post website and it seems they were supposed to break off their rally at 9pm Saturday night but refused and planned on going through Sunday. Wooot!

I grabbed my camera and headed down to the rally again. Most of these pics are from today’s shoot. I’m going to try to do a data recovery on the deleted pics on my camera’s memory card (I put in a new one for today so not to overwrite anything on the old one) and I might post those if I can salvage them but these are pretty decent and give a pretty good representation of what the rally was like.