Impasse at the Airport
Monday, December 1st, 2008It’s day 6 that the PAD has occupied Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi and Don Meuang Airports and officials are now putting the economic losses at an incalculable level. Incalculable. Not many things in this world as incalculable.
Today I walked past my travel agent on the way to lunch. My travel agent is impossible to miss. Her office is on a busy corridor leading from the Sky Train to the elevator bank of the building and only a glass door separates her from passersby. The other reason that my travel agent is truly unforgettable (besides being a good travel agent) is that she is actually a “he.” Always immaculate and eye catching in her carefully chosen clothes, she sashays around and is always ready to critique my outfit or my makeup du jour.
Today she beckoned me into her office, waving her manicured hands at me from behind the glass. And she asked, as so many have, if I knew when they would open the airport. (I don’t, of course. And soon, I hope.) She said that she would be paid half her salary this month and that the travel agency could close if the situation continued. But, she said, her plan was to sell iced coffee from a cart if she was no longer a travel agent. We talked a bit about what was happening and she asked me about the foreign perspective. We agreed that blockading the airports was not really hurting Mr Thaksin or Mr Somchai–the PAD’s avowed enemies, but ordinary Thais, just like her.
I’ll hear more of these stories, I expect, as the crisis goes on and after it ends. I’ve been covering this crisis since the very first rallies since early 2006 and the global economic slowdown and its effects on the Thai economy, which was already slowing.
The fallout may indeed be incalculable, but when it’s people you know, people who make your life a bit easier by being good at their jobs and a bit more pleasant by just being in it, the costs suddenly become measurable and terrible.
