Back to Bangkok

After our amazing trip to Siem Reap, we headed back to Bangkok for an overnight connection before my parents were to fly to China and I was to fly to Vienna for my final MBA term. The day before we left we learned that the Red Shirt protests in Bangkok had escalated and violence was erupting throughout the city. Luckily, my dad had changed our hotel reservation so that we wouldn’t have to make the half-hour trek across the city to get the hotel we had previously stayed in. Our revised reservation was at an airport hotel so we weren’t in the mess of the protests. It was weird to be watching CNN that night at the hotel and seeing reports of violence that were happening only miles from where we were.

The next morning my parents left bright and early but I had an afternoon flight, and I had an interesting experience in the Bangkok airport. I was looking for a post office to send a postcard to my great aunt, Aunt Annie, and after asking a few people I learned there was one on the second floor inside security. I cleared customs and security, then bought a sandwich and Diet Coke, tucked it in my bag to eat on the plane and exchanged my remaining Thai baht to Euros. I then went in search of the post office, and easily found it after taking the elevator down to the second floor. But as I exited the post office, I realized somehow I had exited security and would have to go back through to get to my gate. I was so annoyed because I had just bought my soda and didn’t have any Thai baht left, and none of the workers I had asked informed me I would be exiting security nor were there any signs indicating the fact. I tried to hide my soda inside my purse (you never know what you can get away with in Asian airport security), but this was not one of the lucky times and security noticed it right away. I decided to be defiant saying, fine, you can have the soda but I’m going to drink some of it first. So I opened the soda in front of the guards and BAM it exploded all over me. What made it even better was the fact that I was wearing a white shirt. So not only did I not get to drink my soda, I had to look at it on my shirt for the next 12 hours. Karma’s a bitch.