A scholarly day

Good morning! It is 5:45 am here in Bangkok-11 hours ahead of Atlanta time. I’ve been writing my posts late in the evening, after we get back to our hotel from the activities of the day, but last night I was too exhausted. So, here I am writing this in the morning of the following day.

We started out the day with a discussion/talk by Charlie Mehl, an American Sociologist living in Bangkok. He gave a great presentation on the role of the king in Thailand. It was yellow day yesterday as it is every Monday. A lot of people were wearing yellow to honor the king. The Thais have a different color for every day of the week-my favorite is Friday (blue).

Thailand has a constitutional monarchy in place with the current king very much admired by the people. They are so passionate about their king. He is also a deity! In fact, it is not accepted in society to talk bad about him in public. Charlie talked a lot about how this current king has redefined the role of the monarchy into a huge philanthropic endeavor and as a worker for the people.

We also visited the Thailand Stock Market yesterday. We had three men talk to us about the financial and economic outlook here in this country. All three men were educated in the U.S. (Cornell, Purdue, Temple)-which is interesting to note. We were presented a PowerPoint presentation that they presented to the economic board of Thailand last week. Currently, the economy is really low here because of the coup de'tat occurred last year. But, the men were predicting that consumer and investor confidence will pick up once elections are held this year and a new government is in place. Currently, the government is temporary and was put in place by the military after the non-violent coup that occurred last September.

A Muslim scholar also talked to us about the conflict (insurgency) in south Thailand. A group of people in the south region of Maya are very unhappy with the government as some violence has emerged over the last year. They are Muslims in a country that is officially 95% Buddhism and 7% Muslim of which 70% of these Muslims live in south Thailand. Although many people, including the media, want to portray this conflict as a religious conflict and even a Jihad by the Muslims, he maintains it is really about ethnicity and not religion. The mindset of the people here, according to him, is that everyone believes that Buddha was a Thai and Muhammad was a Malay, but in actuality, “Buddha was not a Thai, and Mohammed was not a Malay.” He was interesting to here and I will be curious to keep up on this conflict once we leave get back to Atlanta.

We had dinner at a really neat restaurant overlook the river. It was a great way to end the day as it was very peaceful and relaxed dinning along the river. We had traditional Thai food that was yum!

Today, we are making an excursion to the site of the former Kingdom of Ayutthaya, which is now a UNESCO World Heritage site. It is approximately 75 km from Bangkok and we are taking a private tour bus. I’m excited about tonight as we are attending a talk on the Khmer Rouge Tribunal called, “Justice Delayed, or Justice Denied?”