I’m staying quite close to Asok BTS on Soi 31, I’ll go for a walk tomorrow and try and get some photos.
Try getting some from up on the walkway underneath the Skytrain right there.
A contingent of women and ladyboys are now marching to the prime minister’s house. Guess they didn’t get Suthep’s memo about no ladyboys.
We’re leaving for the hospital soon for my colonoscopy. They’d better not block me!
The hell can they do, ask everyone to drop their pants?
They gave me drugs and I slept through it. 
Just this morning I saw the first mention I’d seen so far, on MSN, of the political unrest in Thailand. It was as if it had suddenly started, with no mention of previous protests in the current round of “rioting”
It’s good to have a news source close to the ground, to get a better story. MSN would never mention ladyboys.
NPR has been following the story.
Not as will as Siam Sam, of course. 
It’s pretty easy for the trained eye to spot a ladyboy. They do not look like regular women despite what Westerners think. A Thai would certainly never be fooled. I don’t think I could ever be. Some come close, but you can usually always tell. And some are downright scary ugly. Think Charles Laughton wearing a dress. I’ve seen it. There are some amazingly masculine-looking ladyboys running around.
The protesters did block access to my hospital, that entire stretch of Silom Road was cut off, but there’s a back entrance we used. Appropriate for a colonoscopy, eh? 
(The colonoscopy went well. I’m okay.)
I’m not sure how much traffic chaos was caused yesterday (it’s Monday morning here now), but I do know the crowd around the prime minister’s house got into some sort of shoving match with authorities. Dunno if any ladyboys were involved, but that seems to have been as bad as it got. The prime minister herself was up in the Northeast the whole time and not even at home.
Pictures, coremelt?
Moses and Aaron on a stick!
The Democrat Party, Thailand’s oldest, will boycott the February 2 election, which they would have lost anyway. But this will mean they have not a single seat in parliament. It’s feared this will lead to a worsening of unrest.
Suthep, the protest leader, is now vowing to keep hounding the prime minister until she “leaves office or is dead.” The protesters this morning (Monday morning) have surrounded a stadium that is supposed to be the site of registering candidates for the upcoming election, and they are vowing to block the potential candidates from entering. No doubt if the government chooses another location, the protesters will hotfoot it over to there also.
The army chief is warning of potential civil war if the election does proceed in the current volatile climate. This is being seen in some quarters as code for threatening another coup.
I took some pics yesterday at Asok, but really it was just a bunch of people on the street. Very tame, they were singing folk songs and making lots of noise with whistles but that’s it.
A very well behaved “riot”.
Another foreigner was telling me that the yellowshirts are actually “anti-foreigner” and want “Thailand to be for the thais”. is that actually true? I didn’t really get that vibe at all, there were lots of foreigners walking around at the Asok rally, no one was hassled.
Well, yes and no. Thais in general are anti-foreigner to a certain extent in that they never want to be told what to do by the outside world. Try to suggest any solution to their problems, and they’re quick to stick their nose in the air and sniff that Thailand is “different.” They’re not anti-foreigner to the extent that some other countries are. And they’re so welcoming of visitors that you could be forgiven for thinking that sentiment was missing altogether. But I’ll tell you, there’s a big difference in how Thais interact with someone they know is leaving sometime and someone like me who has pretty much settled in and isn’t going to go away. A noticeable difference. The famous Thai smile becomes just a little bit dimmer. There’s a reason foreigners are not allowed to own land.
One of the themes of the yellow shirts is “fighting for the monarchy,” implying that the red shirts would like to abolish it, which may or may not be true among some red members (I’m not about to get into that here). To that extent, many yellow shirts feel they are protecting the Thai way of life from foreign influence. From time to time, someone will suggest a federal style of government a la the US, and man! You’d think the end of the world had occurred, everyone gets so up in arms about that.
Meanwhile, the protesters did force candidate registration to move elsewhere. Then they took over the HQ of the police’s Department of Special Investigation, the Thai version of the FBI.
Oh, and it’s different now, but it wasn’t too long ago – I certainly remember it – when a Thai lady married to a foreigner could not buy land legally (but she could keep any land she had before the marriage) and lost the right to vote. I believe their children could not bear Thai nationality or they could not attend public schools, something like that. (We’ve no children, so I never paid much attention to that aspect.) A Thai man married to a foreigner, that was different, he lost none of these rights. Again, legal changes were made, and now my wife can vote and buy land along with the other Thais, but that’s representative of some of the anti-foreigner paranoia. Definitely a love-hate relationship.
So, if your wife were wealthy and owned property a bit more than just the flat you live in, and she died would you be allowed to inherit?
Yes I would, but then this is not land. It’s a condominium. Foreigners can own condos as long as the majority of the building is Thai-owned. She does have land, and if she dies, I guess her family gets that. I’m not sure what happens to land that is owned by the wife that the couple are living on and then the wife dies, but I suspect the husband had better have good relations with his in-laws. In the event there were no relatives, I hope he’d be allowed to sell it, but maybe the state would confiscate it. Dunno. I asked the wife, and it’s not something she’s ever thought about.
Meanwhile, here’s more on today’s doings.
Ye gods! Now this is getting serious. The red shirts are striking at my beloved Singha beer (which I just happen to be sipping while logged in here tonight). An heiress of the family that brews Singha has been vocally supporting the protesters, to the extent that she’s been giving speeches onstage. The reds today surrounded an affiliate of Boon Rawd Brewery up in the Northeast, demanding she stop “insulting rural people” such as the northeastern red shirts.
And now the beer family has just disowned the poor lass.
Oh, sorry, you said “a bit more” than our condo. She does, but as with most Chinese-Thai families, each member owns something, and all together it belongs to “The Family.” I doubt I would get anything, nor would I try. If it’s land, as I mentioned, there’s going to be some mechanism that ensures I don’t keep it.
Well, “disowned” is a bit over the top. The family is making her change her surname, but it sounds like she’s still in the family. But who do they think that will fool?
Still following along with interest. Glad your colonoscopy went well, Siam Sam, and thanks for keeping us posted.
Ah, that makes sense. Though if I were married to a Thai, I would be really twitchy about being widowed - not having any kids and being too old to reproduce [and lacking the organs to do so despite my age] I would be really worried about being done out of any sort of inheritance, land or money/material goods.