CNS: Get Out !!

Over the weekend, I met up with my good friend Mai. You might recall our previous trips to Ayutthaya and Koh Kred together. Since Jeremy and Sacha returned to good ol’ Canada, she and I have been getting together every other week or so. She’s studying to teach English at Ramkamhaeng Open University, so she’s more than happy to help me with my Thai while I help her with American slang and popular language. I’m not really an expert or anything, of course, but who else is going to explain to her why I’m the only one to burst out laughing when Jameson mistakenly calls Peter Parker, Peter Pecker? Or why I can barely contain myself when I’m watching Epic Movie and they refer to Mr. Beaver in Chronicles of Narnia section as “hairy beaver.” Or why I was just writhing in my seat during the “Mr. Wang” scene in Ocean’s 13 while nobody else seemed to bat an eyelash? Anyhow, we speak in something like Tinglish so passer-bys tend to look at us funny. It was particularly fun to talk politics with her in a mix of Thai and English. So Saturday came about as some of these conversations. What did I do on Saturday, you ask? Well, let me just show you some pictures first!

Don't we just look fierce in our protester gear?? That's a BIG picture of the princess in the back...


Ummm...so what do I do with these??


This is us trying to get a better view (and a safer spot from which to watch if things got crazy)


Talk about jumping on the bandwagon. I also have them on video if you're interested...



Yes, that is the Democracy Monument in the back. It's kind of...bittersweet, this shot.


What a polite and orderly crowd. They behaved enough to actually let traffic flow.


Protests aside, Thais know what's important in life -- food.


This is Mai & I taking a break at the Temple of the Golden Mount(ain) & preparing for the monsoon.


This is me ringing the sacred bells so that I can earn fame, wealth and beauty...


My supermodel shot of the day...did I at least get the beauty part? (can you tell that it was windy?)


And just because I know you like pretty pictures...I took this picture of a water lily in a pot at the temple.


Anyway, in case you're wondering what the heck is going on...these pictures are of the daily mass demonstrations that are being held to protest military rule in Thailand...and the words on our headgear and flags say "CNS Get-Out." CNS stands for Council for National Security -- they are the coup-makers. Anyway, they’re demanding an immediate step-down of the CNS board members and for elections to be held now as opposed to the one originally promised in December but now moved to November. So many of the people protesting are supposedly paid to be there (by whom is a matter of speculation, but some sources point to the former PM Thaksin Shinawatra or his cronies) and they are mostly rural Northeasterners. The going rate is somewhere between 2-500 baht per day...which even at the low end of this estimate is above the average daily wage earned by rural laborers if they were stay in the provinces and toil at agricultural work (which is somewhere around 110 baht – a little over $3). The problem now is that as part of the anti-corruption probe into the Shinawatra family vault by the government’s Assets Examination Committee, 21 Thai bank accounts have been frozen. No money goes in or comes out. So if it’s true that Thaksin has indeed been bankrolling the protesters’ “daily fare,” then there’s going to be a little bit of a problem.

Anyhow, on this particularly gray day in BKK (It reminds me of Seattle…oh, how I miss Seattle), Mai and I decided to be adventurous and go test the waters. We caught a public bus that took an eternity to get there, mostly because no matter how long it takes to get there, your fare stays the same – unlike the meter on the taxi! It took about an hour I think to do a trip that normally takes 10 minutes with light traffic. City officials had blocked off certain streets and re-directed traffic to deal with the thousands of protesters, orderly as they are, and maintain some semblance of normality on Ratchadamnoen Road. The reason I say “adventurous” is because that on the surface, it’s supposed to be a peaceful protest, but nobody can really be sure and the army isn’t taking any chances. They’ve brought in troops from all over the country and commissioned the city’s police as peacekeepers. Officially, there are no firearms allowed, but neither Mai nor I were checked before we wandered into the crowd. A couple of weekends ago, a group of angry demonstrators broke through a barricade leading to Government House, aka CNS headquarters, which lead to a bit of roughing up on the part of the over-zealous citizens. Earlier this week, they banned motorcycle taxis from Ratchadamnoen Rd…their operators then protested by engaging in something like an early morning motorcycle drag race that disrupted commuter traffic. “Ooy, Amazing Thailand” is what you might hear at this point if you asked an informed Thai on the street. It’s a little bit ironic how the use of this phrase came about. As some of you may know, I’m a big fan of the power of language and how it is used to convey meaning – “words have meaning” as Dr. Madsen loved to say in our early morning Latin class. Amazing Thailand was a famous marketing slogan coined in 1999 to promote tourism to the kingdom. Since then, it has been used as a sort of catchphrase to refer to things that you could only see or experience in Thailand. Or, as Jeremy likes to say, TiT (This is Thailand) when things happen in a way that is less than desirable or expected.

So next week I go back to Cambodia to visit my mom who is in Phnom Penh visiting my grandma. My friend Sean from Seattle is visiting for a little over a week, so I’m bringing him along. We’ll make an obligatory stop in Siem Reap to see Angkor Wat and then head up to Phnom Penh to see my mom. I think I’ll just buy her a ticket to come to BKK so she can have something resembling a vacation as opposed to taking verbal abuse from my grandma the whole time about how she should have done this thing in this way and not the other – gosh, when I met my grandma for the first time back in 2001 or so, it was like a revelation. All of a sudden, I knew where my mom came from. Hah hah =)~

The point is that I’ll save my reflections about Cambodia from my first trip back in April when Razz and Beth were here and write about them at the same time once Sean and my mom go back home. That means you’ll just have to wait a wee bit longer to find out how the Cambodian boy who “went back home” feels about it. Cheers ~