I see my first red shirts

I leave for school at 6 a.m. Friday, concerned that the Sky Train might be closed, throwing the morning commute into chaos. Happily, the train is still running, but only as far as Chong Nonsi, the stop before mine -- an easy walk.

The train is virtually empty, and so are the streets all the way to Sala Daeng station, near my school. Sidewalks normally choked with vendors and office workers instead are lined with police and military vehicles. And there are many soldiers.

The Jets and the Sharks are ready to rumble.

Taking no chances, the school closes for the day. Most of my classmates get word in time and do not attempt the commute. I stay and work for a while, then retreat back to safety across the river.

---

Friday evening I bump into Betsy, Kiwi Mike and Warren at the 7-Eleven. We all end up back at Warren's place (which is much nicer than any of ours). After a few beers, we tag along with Mike -- a brick-solid New Zealander with a taste for adventure -- who's meeting up with some mates at an expat bar in Sukhumvit.

At the bar, Kiwi Mike disappears to work the room, so the remaining three of us hang out playing cutthroat pool. Wisely I switch to club soda, but Betsy and Warren throw back a couple of shots with more beer. At 12:30 closing Mike wanders back to our table with a Thai bar girl in tow. Okayyyy ...

Mike makes proper introductions all around. Attempting to make small talk, Warren asks her: "So, where did you learn English?" Apparently this is considered a terribly rude question because she instantly turns on heel and storms away.

"Thanks a lot, Warren!" says Mike. "There goes my (uh, let's say "date") for the evening." Poor Warren has no idea what he said or did.

By this time Betsy's feminist outrage is boiling over at the Sukhumvit flesh trade. So Kiwi Mike delights in turning up the stove a little hotter: he leads us a couple of blocks over, along sidewalks packed curb-to-wall with whores, to "a place we can get a bite to eat" -- which turns out to be a McDonald's across the street from the girlie bar where he's headed in to meet a new companion du noir. Betsy goes ballistic.

"I hate this! I hate this!" she rages. "This is evil and wrong and I do NOT want to be here!" The moment is deteriorating badly. So Warren and I load Betsy into the very next cab, wish Kiwi Mike happy hunting, and head back across the river.

Or try to.

What we do not know is that the red shirt confrontation has exploded (literally) into violence this evening. We round a corner and are instantly halted at a military checkpoint, where soldiers search the trunk before waving us ahead into a chaotic, dead-end traffic jam. At one end of this road are the soldiers, and at the other end, a ragtag band of deadly serious-looking red shirts who wave us back the way we came. And so we ping-pong slowly back and forth between the two factions. Every so often our driver jumps out of the cab and runs down the road to holler and jabber at other taxi drivers. And the meter ticks on ...

Finally a side road opens up and we make our escape onto an adjacent freeway. We get home sometime after 2:30 a.m.