The Protest, The Roof, The Train.

Kavi had asked me, back on Koh Samui, if I was interested in spending Sunday with him. He said he was working with an organization (it turned out to be their Uni's newly minted local chapter of Food not Bombs) and they were going to the industrial part of Bangkok to visit some factory workers.

I was hazy on the details, because I've gotten in the habit on this trip of basically vetting people, then accepting their advice or recommendations unilaterally once they've earned my trust. This has given me chances and opportunities I'd never have gotten otherwise, and has been very rewarding. Kavi had said something about demonstration, but I later figured out he was hazy on the details as well, and we sortof found out the whole story when we arrived.

So it was that I met up with a dozen new and potential members of the local Food Not Bombs chapter at the McDonald's near the southernmost Skytrain station around 10:30 in the morning.

At 11, we split up, piled into cars and headed off for the factory. In my car were Ploy (the driver, in shiny silver eye liner and ponytail, Poly-Sci, going to Syracuse university in NY to study for a couple years), Big (The softspoken guy with what sounded like either a strong Thai accent or a mild speech impediment), Kavi, Chee(the cheeriest, and one of the skinniest girls I've ever met who appeared to eat ok, obviously the "Blonde" of the group), and Mo (If the three girls were the straight from the cast of Mean Girls, Mo was Lohan--more reserved, but still a girly girl at heart, and studying Literature (German) with a minor in English).

Every one of them (with the exception of Big) was almost as fluent in English as I am, and they were a rowdy chattering bunch. I got the front seat and chatted with Ploy about her upcoming time in the States while the backseat became a wall of chaotic Thai discussion and laughter. Ploy would roll her eyes from time to time towards the backseat and say "soooo Thai!" drawing it out like a joke, and we'd laugh.

It tooks us a while to reach the outskirts of Bangkok, and when we got there we found a huge set of event style tents, in a side street. It was temporary home to perhaps 50-100 Thai women. I would estimate most of their ages between 30 and 50. They were protesting layoffs at their factory.

The company (Swiss/German at the top of the corporate ladder) had suddenly laid off several hundred of them, including dozens of pregnant women and single mothers. Now Thailand's cheap labour is one of the selling points for companies looking to invest in a factory, so there are very few labour protections. As near as I could gather, most of them were working OT just weeks before the layoffs, and then when one of their contracts ran out, the company dropped everyone expendible immediately and put in place additional ways to fire people on flimsy excuses.

I found out the suspicion was that they would get a new contract from a different retailer in August, but when they began hiring then they would probably set an age cap on new hires at 25 or 30. There are no anti-discrimination laws here for things like Age, so they can do that, even though these have been their most loyal and faithful workers for years. They're offering severance pay, of course, but most of these women were proud of their work, and you can see in the way they talk that they aren't joking when they say they want to go back to work, not receive some large check, and they're frustration is obviously not just derived from the fact that it's very difficult to get rehired to factory work after 30 in Thailand.

Now, my own beliefs about the free market say that a company should be allowed to do such a thing, but my beliefs about character and ethics say that they shouldn't. In addition, regardless of which side of that fence I fall on, I think the right to peaceably assemble and cause a stir when someone does something morally wrong but legally permissible is one of the greatest ways to instigate change, so I was all for the demonstration. These women had been living in this tent city in the street for a month already, and they planned to live in it for another month at least.

We were there as a sort of pep squad--a few of the team played drums and guitar or sang, so they put on a small impromptu concert (pumped through incredibly low-sound-quality megaphone speakers) and we (those of us that knew the words) all sang along.

Then, these women, who didn't between the lot of them appear to eat but a handful of food during midday, and had all been unemployed for over a month) went and bought food for us, since we were honoured guests. They laid out a spread, especially for us as the visiting team, of squid and rice and mixed vegetables and papaya vinegar salad and a sort of potato-ish soup and it was all delicious. They fed us like we were dignitaries visiting a foreign court, rather than college students sitting in the street telling a bunch of out of work factory girls to give it the old college try.

The food, by the way, was excellent. I'd been told dozens of times before I came to Thailand that the food the locals ate was so spicy and you'd die, but I had found it throughout my trip so far generally milder than when my family gets together and decides to make something really hot with the right kind of peppers. Kavi's father can't eat much spice, so we didn't have too much at his place, and the rest of the time I think they always thought "White kid! Better make this bland!"

Now, at the demonstration, I was finally handed a typical Thai lunch, ad it was absolutely delicious. It was hot without being too hot to eat, the squid was perfectly prepared, and the rest of the meal was delectable. The kids in my little team were all very curious to see me eat it without missing a beat, and were careful to ask me if it was too hot. I was glad to finally be able to know how hot the Thais really eat their food--I don't think I could eat that way every day, but as an occasional thing, it was great. I did get to snag a picture of Mo enjoying a coke--wax paper cups are expensive, and plastic bags are cheap. They do this in Indonesia as well, but I didn't ever interact with it there.

After lunch, we split up into small groups and went to talk to the workers. This was where I actually got to play a part and be interesting, because I was the foreigner, and this made me fascinating to these women, who probably could count on one hand the number of times they'd had an opportunity to speak to a foreigner, if ever.

So we chose a small cluster of perhaps seven women, which quietly doubled in size once we'd sat down, and started to talk. At first, Kavi did all the talking, listening to their story about the factory and how they had all received an SMS at 1AM On a Friday telling them that that day the plant would be closed, and to meet on Monday morning for the news, where they were given layoff letters, which also promised them money which of course they haven't seen yet.

It was interesting to me because there was so little anger or whining in their expressions and speech. They thought they'd been done an injustice, and yet they did not appear bitter or sad. They laughed while telling their story, of how they'd all been calling each other at 0100 trying to find out if anyone knew anything, and they seemed resigned to the fact that while they wanted things to be different, having a dark spirit about it wouldn't help achieve those ends. It seemed very different than the American union protests I've heard about, with far less bad blood and negativity on every side. It made me curious to know what the factory bosses thought, though of course I'll never know.

But once Kavi had relayed their story and told them a little about us, the subject turned to my presence. They asked me what I thought of Thailand, and the food, and the places I'd been that had the nicest people. Kavi and Mo sat on either side, and acted as my translators, sometimes word for word, sometimes seriously abbreviating my stories. I told them about the the Greek hotel where they'd worried so much about me and Adrienne when we missed the last Ferry and couldn't call to tell them we would arrive a day late, and how I loved the food and the people in Thailand.

As conversation started to die out, I borrowed one of their water bottles, and showed Mo, who was seated to my right, the Cup game we used to play at Mercer, that several Mercerian friends of mine had brought with them from middle school cafeteria's scattered throughout Georgia. I didn't know if it would catch on, but I asked her if they had anything similar. They said they played rythm games but not this one.

So I taught it to them. Some of the women were uninterested, but other's eyes lit up immediately as if I'd just sang a concerto or showed them the secret of levitation, one in particular joined the circle immediately once she realized it was a 'pass along' game, and I slowly taught about ten of them the sequence while the band started back up in the background, and we played for a few minutes. We didn't get a full rollicking game going on (we didn't really have enough time) but the few who were interested got to learn the sequence, and I made sure to go and sit next to the one who had been most interested and make sure she knew it before I left.

When we had finished and it was getting near 1600, the organizer of the protest spoke to us for a time and gave our group all DVDs with information about the event, which I was forced (by the good natured Cajoling of my team members--"They asked for the most attractive one to go up! You're the foreigner, you're special, you go!") to go up and act as the representative to collect. I went and took them and bowed in thanks as best I knew how, then brought them to our group leader and rejoined my little huddle.

The ladies brought us fruit to try during the speech, including one that the Thais refer to as "Foreigner fruit" which of course was placed nearest me. The fruits were all good, both the ones I recognized and the ones I didn't, and we cheered for the organizer and shouted "Sou-Sou!" which Kavi told me means "Fight fight" but might be better translated as "struggle struggle!" and would probably be best caught up in this context in the word "Persevere!"

When the speeches were over our small Food not Bombs group reconvened and talked about what we thought and what we'd learned.

Big went straight home with the rest of the FnB team, but the rest of Ploy's car crowd had decided to adopt me and that we should all go to dinner before I had to leave for Chang Mai, so we drove back into the city, dropped by my hotel and grabbed my backpack, and then headed out for Italian.

It was a somewhat surreal experience, having dinner with four young Thais in an Italian restaurant near KhaoSan road, which had a big screen TV showing old Michael Jackson concert footage in the background.

The food was decent enough, though it wanted for seasoning, and we had a great time talking and laughing. All of them had traveled in Europe, and so we talked about the differences in cultures and the experiences of going there. When Kavi and Ploy admitted they'd been to Paris but not gone inside the Louvre, I made them hold out their hands and slapped their wrists, and this started a grand tradition. For the rest of the night, anytime someone thought of something that they thought was especially Thai that I hadn't done or wasn't going to do on my visit, they would gleefully demand my wrist and slap me. I would laugh and lie and said I hadn't done things I had, just to turn around a moment later and change my story, which usually earned me an extra slap of course.

At dinner I find out that the international opinion is that all Thai girls put-out really easily, and the girls at my table all regale me with horror stories of international trips where men tried to pick them up and suggested sex after knowing them for just a handful of minutes, or going near the red light district here in Bangkok and being asked "How Much?" when they are out showing friends the town.

This shouldn't need to be said, but oh well.

Let me clear this up, men (or hell, women) who are reading this and might meet Thais traveling abroad, or go to visit their country: The vast majority of Thai girls are not prostitutes or easy lays, and you'll look like an ignorant, selfish, slovenly asshole for assuming that they're all interested in sex with you at the drop of a hat. Also, sit up straight, eat your vegetables, and stop wearing that retarded ballcap to the dinner table. While I'm on a roll: Your popped collar looks ridiculous, your fauxhawk makes you look like a highschooler, and flip flops didn't go out, they were never in to begin with, get yourself some shoes and some manners and start acting like an adult. People like you are why people like me get told to lie and say I'm Canadian when I travel abroad, and it pisses me off.

After dinner, we had a couple of hours left together and so we went over to Khao San road. It turns out that young internationally experienced Thais love the place, because they're always meeting interesting people there, and it has a sort of carnival atmosphere at night, with food vendors every few feet ("Have you tried Mango and Sticky rice with Coconut milk yet? Ok give me your hand. [whap] Now go buy some!") and cheap heat-transfer T-shirts selling for 100 baht everywhere you look. There are few Thai there aside from salespeople, my little crowd, and the occasionally 'girlfriend' of a sexpat or two, and it feels gratifying and somehow special to be the foreigner who has made friends with locals.

After we wander and Ploy buys a T-shirt with a map of Thailand made of the names of places in Thai and English script--so she can proudly show off her heritage while she's in the States--we head upstairs to the Roof, a bar on the top of one of the buildings with live music provided by one (pretty skilled) guitarist/singer who covers Jack Johnson, Live, and a few others.

We sit and drink and Mo offers me a handrolled Cigarette which I accept, and she rolls one up and another for herself. She laughs that she's drinking Tomato juice to be healthy but also smoking, and I explain that I only ever started because of Bartending. Ploy immediately perks up and peppers me with questions, she wants a job when she gets to the US for pocket money, and she thinks Bartending would be a good choice. I tell her it would be a great choice, and to go for it and give her such advice as I have about how to land the job. She's smart and sassy and cute and her English is great, she'll make bank if she finds the right bar and gets a decent manager to train her.

They plead and beg for me to skip out on my train to Chang Mai and stay with them in Bangkok, and I tell them they should have met me at the beginning of last week, when I was having so much less fun, but that I really want to go to Chang Mai while I'm here and I only have two days left. They finally acquiesce, but not without joking every few minutes that we've lost track of time and it's after 10pm and my train has already left.

I buy the drinks as a token of my thanks for showing me such a good time, which they protest heavily, but I win of course, and the total tab for all five of us comes to less than $15, and I laugh them off with my usual retort in these situations "You're all students, and I have a real job already! Wait until you've graduated and you can return the favour."

I promise to check to see if I've got any friends up in the northeast that Ploy should meet up with and promise to friend them all on facebook, which is going to be a really handy way to keep up with the friends I'm making on this trip over the coming years.

Around 0920, we leave the roof and bundle Mo into a taxi--she's way overdue to get back to her mother, especially since Mo told her earlier in the night that she was still helping clean up from the demonstration--and head for the train station.

Ploy is terrible with directions, but Thai trains never leave on time, so it honestly doesn't worry me even when we get lost and only arrive at the train station 8 minutes before it's scheduled to leave. I toss my bag on board, sprint back into the station to buy some snacks to serve as a second small dinner, and bound back to the train as it should (in theory) be pulling away.

Then we wait, of course, for twenty minutes before it actually leaves. It's another second class car with fans in the roof and no AC, but that's fine by me and it lets me open the windows and enjoy the thick Thai air as we leave the city. There are two small seats facing across from each other that turn into one bed, and the other drops out of the wall like a murphy-bunkbed. The beds are actually quite comfortable, and the service on the train is excellent.

I sleep like a baby.