Thaksin, not Taxi

A guy named Thaksin is the current prime minister of Thailand. A few weeks ago, he authorized the sale of a huge Thai mobile phone company to competitors in Singapore. This was not only unpopular because Thailand lost a large company and all the jobs and money that went with it, but the one person who benefited the most from it was Thaksin himself, who pocketed a clean $2 billion from the deal. He was, even before this happened, the richest man in Thailand. This started a large movement protesting the Prime Minister, telling him to step down from his position and, ideally, having the beloved king name a replacement. The night before we left Thailand for Vietnam, I convinced a tuk-tuk driver to take me and some others to the protests. It took a while to find a willing driver. Most just scoffed at the idea of going out there and drove off without us, but the one I did find was plenty insane. He insisted on doing wheelies with a three-wheeled doom machine on crowded highway streets, but it did get us there, so I'm not complaining. That night was the largest the protests had been yet, some 100,000 plus. As a handful of Westerners, we stood out. Heads would turn in our direction, people would shout out. No one was rude, and most were just curious to see what we were doing there. An upper level employee from Eton PLC (a large Thai power company) nabbed us and gave us flags and head bands to wear. He told us his take on everything, and as we were speaking with him, dozens of people stopped around us to take pictures of our conversation. I was becoming slightly self-conscious with all this undue attention and decided to move on. A block or so down we ran into a gentleman signing autographs at a table. Will Cole was wearing a Carleton shirt, and this man recognized it. "Carleton College?" he asked. Wow. Who knows about Carleton in Thailand? From what I could hear over the din, he used to teach at the University of Chicago and was known as Dr. Woody P(something or other... there is more after the P, but I couldn't tell you what it was). His Thai name was longer than I could hope to remember, but he served as the intellectual behind the movement and was a fascinating character to run into. He took all our headbands, autographed them, and talked to us for a while about the protests, Carleton, and our program. This was incredible. The line of people waiting for him to finish the conversation wasn't all too pleased, but they were probably assumed we were far more important than we were and could be allowed such attention. We continued on. Some guys with video cameras showed up and had us shout "Thaksin get out!" a few times. It was time to get back, so we turned around. The street we needed to find was towards the front of the protests where there was some speaker ranting about this or that. Before too long we ended up picking our way across the front line of this mass of people. Flags were heaving to and fro, people were up and shouting and dancing, there was power, energy, dramatik. As we kept moving through, there was a mass of people tracking us behind the fence near the stage. I turned and looked and was dazed by a dozen flashes. The press had found us and was taking pictures of everything we did. Embarassed and fascinated, we made our way through as quickly as possible. A day later, as we were getting off the bus to our hotel in Vietnam, Roy told us he got an e-mail from our guide, Frank (his name is actually Manop, but if you've ever Father of the Bride, this guy was Frank through and through). Frank had been watching the evening and saw a curious site during the feature on the protests. Some Americans had shown up, wearing Carleton shirts, sure enough. Well, it couldn't have been anyone else, but I wish I had seen it nonetheless. Not that I ever thought I'd be in Thailand, Asia for that matter, but even then, who'd have thought I would make the evening news?