Bangkok February 17

This is our last day of our trip. We spent the morning repacking our luggage for the flight home, trying to update this blog, and just relaxing.

Around 2:00 we headed back into Bangkok to Terminal 21 where we were meeting a friend, Chantana, and her family for dinner.

We arrived at Terminal 21, a huge shopping mall, to find the protests in full swing. It was Monday so the protests were happening around the city.

There was a large stage set up across one of the intersections. Speeches were given from the stage.

This empty street would be filled with tents later that evening.

There were tents set up on the walk ways over the road.

Vendors for food and protest souvenirs were set up all around the area.

There were large screens set up because the area was so large.

After work Chantana and her family came to meet us at Terminal 21 for supper. Chantana was a graduate student at St. Michaels College. She took graduate courses from both Charlie and me when we taught summer classes there. She also worked in Jane's classroom as part of her graduate program. She was in many of Jessica's graduate classes and they became good friends. 

Chantana and her husband are both teachers in a private school in Bangkok and their 7 year old daughter attends the school that Chantana teaches in.

We had a great time visiting and catching up on what everyone has been doing since graduating from college.  We promised to get together again someday.

It was dark when we left the restaurant and more protesters had come and set up their tents. There were hundreds and hundreds of these small tents set up in the streets. It was strange because you didn't see as many people in relationship to the number of tents. We wondered if some of the people just set the tents up and went home to sleep.

Vendors selling their wares.

More tents.

Things seemed to be pretty quiet with the protesters. There was someone giving a speech, people walking around and not much else happening. Although, during our trip we had been receiving US Government updates on the protests and knew that some of the protests had turned violent. We were careful walking around but weren't afraid.

We rode the train back to Lat Krabang Station and took a taxi back to our hotel. We were beginning to feel train/subway travel savvy. This was the end of a great trip for us. We tried to get to bed early as we needed to get up at 4:00 AM to catch the hotel shuttle ride to the airport.

The Great Residence Hotel. We choose this hotel to stay in because it was close to the airport (about 10 minutes away) and had free shuttle service to the airport. If we had stayed in the city it would have taken over an hour to get to the airport and might have taken longer to get there because of the protests.