A new year

lettuce, originally uploaded by Dianthus.

After our day exploring Chinatown and Khao San Road, we managed to stay up until midnight and watched some of the fireworks through our window. On a total whim, I checked my email to see if anyone had sent a New Year’s message. There was one message from my brother asking if we were ok, that he had been reading about bombings in Bangkok. I was shocked! I quickly pulled up Google News to see what was going on. We hadn’t seen or heard anything while we were out, or anything on our way back to the hotel. I wrote an email to our families to let them know we were fine and safe at the hotel. The initial reports told us that the bombs weren’t anywhere near where we had been or near our hotel.

We woke up to find the bombings all over the newspapers. At first it was only 6 bombs nowhere near us, and then found out later that the police had disarmed a bomb at Khao San Road a few blocks from where we had dinner (although, we had been gone for a few hours at that point). In the papers was a lot of speculation on who was responsible. The main parties seemed to be supporters of the government that was ousted by the coup or the group in the southern portion of Thailand (where things like this happen on a daily basis).

We decided it was best to lay low and stay at the hotel. Both D and I were glued to our computers reading the news trying to find out more. We did some laundry and went to a nearby restaurant for dinner.