There was a coup last night in Thailand!

Oh God, you read about this stuff but you never think you'll be living through it. Last night, at almost eleven, the armed forces and the police staged a coup. Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra was out of the country, getting ready to address the UN General Assembly in New York. I was taking a shower and when I came out, my brother had had my mother switch from her Thai soap to CNN. "What's going on?" I asked my mom and brother. "I don't know but there are tanks all over Bangkok," said my bro. Now, you have to understand something about Thailand and living in Thailand and being Thai - we have a lot of coups. No, seriously, this country has seen more coups than a jar of honey has seen flies. The last one was a couple of years ago, yeah, but still - revolution is in our blood. Anyhow, there have been rumors of a coup for a few weeks. Even I, the most apolitical of girls, have heard them. Suffice to say, a lot of the country was not pleased with our PM. Well, this really radical journalist was gonna stage a huge, country-wide protest or something such like that around today. So, I guess a lot of people realized it might come down to violence and so the army/police decided to step in. Man, were things hectic last night. All the TV stations were shut down and filled with images of His Majesty the King. My family was switching between CNN and BBC to get the news, since Thai TV wasn't telling us anything, but that was shut off a bit later. It was official. It was a coup d'etat, but at that point, we weren't sure who or what was behind it. I went to bed around midnight, wondering what the heck was going to happen. I was supposed to go into university today, but thank God I had the foresight to call up my friend (at six in the morning, I should be shot!) and she told me it'd been declared a national holiday. All businesses, schools, banks and the stock exchange had been shut down for the day. So, I had a free day today - not as good as it could be, all things considered, but despite what some of the foreign news services have been saying, things are pretty quiet here. Calm, peaceful - even playful. People have been going down and supporting the troops that are keeping order in Bangkok; some chick even tied a yellow ribbon onto some soldier's gun! (Yellow is the king's color, by the way.) Things are well for the time being. Okay, so in a democratic country we shouldn't have a) coups, bloodless or otherwise and b) freedom of the press should reign, regardless. Cutting off CNN and BBC was not a good move, but I can see how they might not have wanted things to get out of control. Things were just barely contained last night; "confusion" was the word in the air, not revolution. I can't tell you how chill the Thais are taking this. I went out to breakfast and people were milling around the mall, getting on with their lives as usual. It's like we didn't experience a coup last night, as if we're not living through history. Makes me think history is just another day out of our lives. Significance is in hindsight.

Final thought: Sometimes the business of living gets in the way of life.