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Some residents have fled for safety. The government declared Monday and Tuesday public holidays so nobody has to cross the danger zone to go to work. Outside the city center, life goes on somewhat normally. People are buying groceries, taking their morning jogs and sipping lattes at outdoor cafes. But there are inconveniences
-- the elevated Skytrain will remain closed Monday for the third day and all schools in Bangkok were ordered closed for at least a week starting Monday. There is also tension and fear the violence will spread, and everyone wonders how many lives will be lost before it stops. Just a few blocks east of the Red Shirt zone, expatriates chatted over beers as on any weekend afternoon at an open-air restaurant off Sukhumvit Road, another district popular with expats and wealthy Thais. "You get a lot of calls from home, from people asking if you're OK. They see the one shot on the news of a bus burning and they think all of Bangkok is the same," said Dutch businessman Ruud van der Linden, 52, who has lived in Bangkok with his family for six years. Even from relative safety, there are new rules to live by. Notably, stay away from the center of Bangkok. Indian expat Anna Khendry, 47, has forbidden her two teenage boys from going out at night even though they live far from the conflict. "Everything is on hold because that's a war zone," she said. "When my kids want to go out at night, I restrict them. You could get a random bullet."
For that reason, many have evacuated to temporary housing. "We're safe now. Thank God we got out just in time," said Indian expat Manisha Trivedi, a nursery school teacher whose gated apartment building on posh Langsuan Road was adjacent to the protest zone and is now hemmed in by the fighting. She and her family fled to the Sukhumvit area Thursday as a standoff intensified. Toddlers at Trivedi's international school, not far from her home, rehearsed safety drills last week. Students were told to meet in the hall if alarm bells sounded. "We told them if you hear three bells, we take the class upstairs and we sit in the hall and basically we wait and we stay safe," Trivedi said. "You just think, what sort of place are we living in."
[Associated
Press;
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