OK!! What does the red-shirters have to do with the chips? And why are chips so important? And why am I making a big fuss out of chips? It's a long story. So, I will try to make the long story short:
Chips are our past time. It's a girly past time. Especially when we want to return to our puberty time and enjoy those silly conversations about classmates (now ex-classmates or colleagues), school (now work), boys (now husbands or boyfriends). We have planned our whole trip around chips because 1) Thailand has perhaps the most variety of chips 2) We can consume all different kinds of chips and be nostalgic about the good old days.
Unfortunately, there is something in my body that stops me from enjoying chips to their fullest. If I eat too much, I will have fever. I am not kidding you. I only found that out when I became a full-grown adult. (By which I mean when I was 25) haha! This was also the time when I realized that I couldn't drink alcohol (I had alcohol poisoning once when I studied in London. And the doc (bear in mind that he is a caucasian) had to tell me that I should refrain from any alcoholic drinks.
Anyway, I still lingered to the dreams of enjoying one or two pieces of chips even to see my friends having such a wonderful time is good enough for me (How nice I am...) So, we have planned to go to the supermarket on Sunday for Sunday night will be our last night in Bangkok.
We went different ways to do our last shopping and agreed to meet at the food court at Parragon so that we could invade the gigantic food mall there. We ate our lunch and got ourselves ready to march to the snacks counter when suddenly we were stopped by the security guard at the entrance.
We were all shocked and I asked the security guard why we couldn't get in. She just said "EMERGENCY". And then I asked, "What kind of emergency to stop us from shopping and what's going on?" She then whispered into her supervisor's ears and afterwards with a nod from him, she told me "MOB! MOB outside". And we were sure that it must be the red-shirters. Luckily, we had learnt the shortcut so we left quickly and returned to our hotel in no time.
By then, I saw my cell had several missed calls. Four from my two brothers. Two text messages from my colleagues and friends. And I called them up to tell them we were very safe. Mortified, my brothers refused to believe me and thought I lied to them. I had to tell them this is not a voice mail to calm them down. Only when I returned to Hong Kong did I realize that what's shown on TV terrified the Hong Kong people. How powerful media can be!!
In fact, the only scary episode of the whole drama was that we saw the tank..... from our hotel. And apart from that, we were really safe. Shops and supermarkets were closed to avoid looting. But restaurants were still open and that's why we could enjoy C'est Bon (the French restaurant chain). Since there were no shops open, we were so desperate that we had to kill time at Intercontinental's ripping-off-tourists shop.
The street was not so dead quiet. There were still quite a few hawkers selling jewels and dodgy-looking hotpants. Still clinging on the dreams of a chips party, my friends asked one another if there were any 7/11s around Intercontinental. I couldn't believe my ears. Amidst the possible danger of riots, they were still thinking about...chips. How amazing! Other friends were already looking at those dodgy-looking pants and raved about how nicely they look on their butts and how thrilled their husbands would be when they saw them wearing those pants (One is a black one with a lot of cherries on as far as I could recall). I kept rolling my eyes as I guess cherries would expand to appalling shapes once they are on a human butt.... But... beauty on the eyes of a beholder. So, I shut my mouth.
We did have a great party sans chips. We did talk a lot about our lives together and we did ride the waves, for better or worse. Kapunka, Bangkok.
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