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We interrupt our regular broadcast to bring you a special report from Bangkok, as the proverbial dust settles after the recent coup d'etat and life returns to normal... =) Thanks to all of you who've called or emailed over the last week to check how I was; your concern is much appreciated but totally unnecessary! To reassure you a little, I thought I'd put up some photos I took the other day and tell you a bit about what it's like to be living here right now. If you're looking for a well-informed and insightful analysis of the current political climate and intelligent predictions for Thailand's immediate future, I'd suggest you look elsewhere. Instead, this will just be a farang student's perspective of the situation in Thailand, (and that's a fairly limited perspective!).

Martial Law in the City of Angels

Michael Meadows
2006-10-23 13:07:42

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We interrupt our regular broadcast to bring you a special report from Bangkok, as the proverbial dust settles after the recent coup d'etat and life returns to normal... =) Thanks to all of you who've called or emailed over the last week to check how I was; your concern is much appreciated but totally unnecessary! To reassure you a little, I thought I'd put up some photos I took the other day and tell you a bit about what it's like to be living here right now. If you're looking for a well-informed and insightful analysis of the current political climate and intelligent predictions for Thailand's immediate future, I'd suggest you look elsewhere. Instead, this will just be a farang student's perspective of the situation in Thailand, (and that's a fairly limited perspective!).

Last Tuesday, when the coup took place, I was out with some friends at a local bowling alley. Towards the end of the night, one of my Dutch friends received a call from his dad, who was watching CNN back home in the Netherlands. It was fairly surreal when he returned to tell the rest of us that at that very moment, four tanks had converged on
Bangkok's Government House and a coup d'etat was apparently underway, as we spoke. Foreign news feeds were taken off the air and Thai stations all played the same feature on the royal family, so it was hard to get any hard facts for a while. Fighting the silly temptation to head downtown myself, I went to one of the many 24-hour net cafes near the university, (the Thai students love their all-night online gaming sessions), and tried to get an idea of what was going on.

The next morning, the staff at the International College held a meeting for all of the exchange students. Most of what they told us was common sense - get in touch with friends & family back home, don't go out in big groups (public gatherings of more than five people are illegal - a law we ...