This was our third day in Bangkok. It was a long one, and it was an extreme of experiences, but it was our best.

We were off at eight to Thammarat University. There we walked through a crowded campus and made our way to a very handsome boardroom used by the faculty of the Humanities division - a great square conference table with microphones and gleaming surface (finished underneath as well as on top), tilting armchairs, IBM Powerpoint too. Plus a huge Buddhist altar and a framed portrait of the King, in an easel. He wore his medals and -I checked on this - a boy scout scarf.

Our speakers for the 4-hour seminar that followed were two: Doctor Charnvit Kasetsiri, again, and Professor Sirilaksana Khoman, the chair of the Economics faculty and daughter of a former foreign minister. She was terrific too, warm and able and possessed of great English spoken with a British accent. I am thinking we had two very distinguished professors here, very much with rare international interests and extraordinary experience, not time servers. Thank you, EWC.

They covered the present state of Thailand as a democracy. I will try as best I can to sum up my impressions but they are bound to be partial and subject to error. The speakers focused on the performance of Thaksin Shinawatra, the prime minister, who was presented as a populist, wily and quick, an endless fount of economic schemes. But it seems he is devoted to funneling money to every in-law, cousin, and brother that he can uncover. The faculty of the university, we were told, spends a good deal of time researching the obscure names that appear buried in trade agreements and legislation (his party has a majority in parliament, the first PM ever to have it). These individuals always turn out to be those most benefited, and they also turn out to be loyal and very junior employees of the Thaksin companies. Thaksin began as a silk exporter but grew to rapid wealth with monopolies in telecommunications.

They also covered the impact of the '97 financial crash on Thailand and the shape of its recovery, which is still underway. The concrete columns allover town, it seems, are known to all Thais as the memorial to the crash: they were going to hold up an elevated highway and a second skytrain, both victims of the crash.

Thailand it seems was very vulnerable because the financial pattern was to borrow with short-term repayments -a year or less-but to invest the money in long-term investments. Here as in so many developing countries, access to credit is far from democratic or even rational, since earning/expenditure reporting is opaque and the banks' requirements for qualifying loans are sketchy. I wonder too, just how available those loans are, to those without family influence.

Nevertheless they spoke with hope. Charnvit told in depth the story of the 1973 student revolution that resulted in a constitution and the fall of a three-person dictatorship. But he spoke of the cost. There were dead and injured at the time: they were victims of military actions after peace and compromise had been reached, thanks to the intervention of the King. And Charnvit himself was among the 100 faculty who risked all at the height of the confrontation to sign a petition demanding a constitution.

Three years after this victory, however, one of the dictators returned from exile, staged a coup, and got bloody retribution for his fall. If I have the time-frame right, this occurred in 1976, and it featured a deliberate, all-night massacre of students trapped in an athletic field on campus. Hundreds were killed and many more, I believe, were wounded. Shades of Armies of the Night! Charnvit fled to the United States about this time, and taught at Berkeley.

The president of Thammasat, who had headed the Free Thai underground during WWII, escaped to China it seems.He was never able to return, dying there 17 years later. I missed his name-I have to see the names written out to get them. He had had to flee his riverside home in a small boat with the help of a British man. Many faculty fled to the jungles of the Northeast and joined the Communist partisans there, moderating that movement somewhat I gathered. After three years or more those who survived were able to return to teaching posts and resume their lives. Eventually this dictator was disgraced and deposed but if I heard this right, he lives in wealthy exile in the mid-east somewhere.

Two items I want to follow up: the details and chronology of this military repression, and just how Chuck, my brother, used to trace deposits in Swiss banks with the help of hackers. Sirilakasana showed some interest in this idea. I also want to send some movies to Charnvit, he is really a fan. Running on Empty comes to mind. He has not seen it. He enjoyed Coming Home, he said, which just may be the best of the Vietnam era movies, in my none-too-humble opInIOn.

I have my own impressions about all of this, as I have had in other countries where the public face is so genteel and pious. Societies I know better, such as Colombia, which wear a religious and aristocratic face in ceremony, often have the wildest and most vigorous undergrounds. I am thinking now of the secret business life of civil servants, military officers, and politicians, and of course, of the flaming sex trade here in Bangkok. Bolivia I know has its military in frank control, aristocrats on the outs, and a church that is small, discredited, and reactionary. It also has a grim and graceless social life, and a bunch of fierce but impoverished unions. My impression has been that there is probably less going on in the secret sector there. It is far from utopia but the cards are on the table.

Colombia, much more gracious on the surface, truly is an oligarchy, and the wealth of the underground cocaine economy vastly exceeds that of the public economy. That of course is actually a dogfight between narco cartels and secret military politico cartels. The public war against leftist guerillas actually masks a battle for huge drug revenues. I believe the Colombian military cheerfully manipulates official US interest in counter-insurgency and drugs, to collect military assets used to further its own profitable trade. My pipe-dream for years has been to tackle this story as a free lance. Ah well, I still have trouble accepting life as an educator, it's a little short on adventure.

At lunch I ducked downstairs with Teh, one of our grad-student guides, to see the statue they call the "Thinker". He is a kind of Thai demigod who is a patron saint to the students. He was featured in a poster in the conference room, and Teh explained him to me. The Thinker did not want to be photographed, it seems. My shutter release got sticky on one camera body, and the film advance jammed on the second. Teh suggested that I ask his permission to be photographed, and I did that, and it went better. I should have known better. I think this lithe and youthful, Pan-like figure may have a little power left over to vex an impertinent Westerner, sure enough.

We also saw a BBC video about the King's 50th anniversary (1946-1996), very subtle, and it became much easier to understand why he is so loved. He does a great deal by example and by exquisite timing, and he makes the most of very little temporal power.

Then we were off by bus to the Wat Phra Keo and Royal Palace complex. This is the late nineteenth century capital, really, all temples and towers jammed inside a wall. This plus a genuine, lived-in palace, right in the middle of it all. The place was resplendent beyond what I could grasp: gold and mosaics of glass everywhere, temples, columns, pagodas, towers, pavilions, huge dragons and demons, painted carvings, and more gold everywhere. One temple housed the Emerald Buddha too. 1 had to use my camera on close-up details and the clearest of the open spaces, not much in between, as 1 tried to plan how 1 would convey this to a class. Without this for a viewpoint 1 would have been overwhelmed. There is nothing in American experience like it, that's for sure. It was way too much. 1 think maybe Walt Disney had a former life in this complex.

At one point 1 sat on the ground to photograph some mythical creature, and a Thai man all sweaty just like me, called me over. He had English and we talked a bit while his wife and kids stood by. "I love America," he said. "Really strong. The biggest. 1 love that..."

Somehow 1 lost the guide and missed the rendezvous at closing time. 1 searched for the bus, and ran three long blocks at one point because 1 thought 1 saw our bus in traffic. As 1 sat recovering on a park bench 1 was hit on by a tall, emaciated transsexual prostitute in a black miniskirt and net stockings. He was pitiful and he looked like the next fix of his chosen drug would finish him. 1 was too beat to even think about disgust. 1 felt a wave of pity instead.

Finally 1 hired a tuk-tuk and fired out of there, out of breath and bathed in sweat. By chance 1 overtook our bus a few blocks away. Charlene did not, though. She missed it too.

Back at the university, we had an illustrated lecture (how Bangkok came to be) in a blessedly cool classroom. It began with Anna's King Mongkut, a shrimpy and weathered little guy who looked not one whisker like Yul Brynner. He it was who became an Anglophile, met Queen Victoria, and came home to outfit the palace guards and other elite units in British-type uniforms - all in rainbow colors like yellow, sky blue, and vermilion.

Afterwards we walked the campus at dusk with our lecturer, history professor Kwandee Altavuthichai, spelled correctly 1 hope. She showed us the tower that is the university's emblem, with the statue of the president who had to flee to China in front of it. 1 asked how long it had taken for his reputation to be restored after 1976, and she said it has still not been restored except among the few. She showed us his house too.

With some trepidation, she took us to the athletic field where the massacre had taken place. She had said that she was afraid she would cry there, and she did. She spoke of five of her students who were among the dead, and of two others who escaped and came to her home to keep her from coming down that night. 1 don't think she makes this tour that often. 1 was touched, not to mention thrown back in time. 1 can't stand it, that soldiers can gun down the unarmed and then find impunity when these things are over.

Then it was off on foot, through traffic and over broken walkways in darkness, to Khaosan road, the trekker market. There were only a few of us now. Many had slipped away by taxi in twos and threes after a very long day. We visited an 18th century French fort at the second of the city's three moats, saw a few hundred cheerful twenty-somethings doing aerobics in the park there too. Elliot the grad student turned up at some drinking spot we passed, and disappeared again when he realized we had a professor in tow. I shared a beer with the professor and Namji and Margaret, skipped dinner due to the heat. Then we caught a taxi back to the hotel to pack and otherwise clear things up for tomorrow's departure. At the mall adjacent to the hotel I picked up my laundry and my nine rolls of slides - looking good, Hooray! Mostly Saigon, the Cao Dai temple, and Cu Chi. Bedtime for me was 12:30 and it felt more like 2:30.