Mischievous Monkeys & Mistaken Identities: Tales from the Jack's Community

“I thought that I had gone mad, that I was going to live here forever and this was life now, with Black Iguana.”

“Gold and blue and blue and gold… eventually you become dazzled. Gold-blind, if there’s such a thing.”

“Unfortunately, Manizales gets very few tourists, so Jorge had never realised this aspiration. But when a slightly disoriented English guy got on his bus… he couldn’t believe his luck. Finally! Indeed, it was too good an opportunity to miss.”

I was visiting my friend, an English teacher in Suphanburi - a town in central Thailand about a 90-minute drive from Bangkok - as a sort of 'trial period' to see if I would like to teach at her school myself (I did end up taking a job at the school, but no thanks to this experience!). The story takes place over 4 fateful days in August 2015. 

On Monday, 17th August 2015, I was having dinner with my English teacher friend in a lovely, cozy restaurant in Suphanburi, when all of a sudden our phones started blowing up—there had, very sadly, been a terrorist attack in Bangkok whereby a shrine had been bombed. People were messaging us from home asking if we were okay, so naturally we replied to everyone, reassuring them that we were safe and nowhere near Bangkok.

On Tuesday, 18th August 2015, the Bangkok police released a sketch of the bomber based on CCTV footage - it was a foreign guy with pale skin, glasses, and dark hair. The guy bore a passing resemblance to yours truly - you can start to see where this is going, right?

On Wednesday, 18th August, 2015, my friend and I went to a night market in Suphanburi where I bought a kilogram of mangoes. Thai mangoes are the best, sweetest, most delicious mangoes in the world, by the way, before toddling off home on our scooters.

On Thursday, 19th August, 2015, we were awoken to a commotion in the corridor outside my friend's flat. We went outside, bleary-eyed - I was wearing nothing but a pair of boxers - to find her fellow foreign teachers, all of whom lived in the same apartment building (long story), talking excitedly about how the Bangkok bomber was hiding out in Suphanburi! We were all absolutely gobsmacked; why would a foreigner be in this non-touristy town where foreigners stick out like a sore thumb? Nevertheless, we all agreed to the Thai teachers' advice to stay in our homes unless absolutely necessary, and to go to work as a group for safety reasons.

So there we are, riding our little scooters to a high school out in the rice paddocks of central Thailand, keeping our eyes peeled for the foreign man with the glasses. We didn't see him. 

We arrive at school, and I'm shadowing my friend for her first class of the day, with a group of students who are among her lowest-proficiency in English; we walk in, and there's an immediate stir among the students. They nudge each other and point at me, and one of them appears to 'volunteer' another to come forward to talk to me. So this poor girl, about 12 years old, comes haltingly up to me with her phone in her hand, points to it, and says, "you"'.

So I look at her phone, and sure enough, on it is a screenshot of a Facebook post from the night before; the caption is written in Thai so I don't understand what it says, but the picture is very clearly of me buying mangoes at the night market, with a big red circle drawn around me just to be sure! I nod my head; "yes, that's me," I say, and then she says, "teacher, you - bomb! BOOM!".

At first I think she's accusing me of being the terrorist, which I of course deny, but then she says, "no no no no no", and shows me something else on her phone—it's some Thai she's put into Google Translate, and the English translation comes up as 'misunderstanding'. At this point I'm thoroughly confused, but as it happens, my teacher friend spots a Thai teacher walking by the classroom who apparently spoke pretty good English, so she calls her in. 

"Can you translate for us?" my teacher friend asks.

The Thai teacher doesn't need to. She immediately turns to me and says, with a smile, "oh yes, everyone thinks you're the Bangkok bomber!"

"I'm sorry - WHAT?!"

"Yes yes, someone took a photo of you last night at the market and posted it to Facebook with the caption, 'everybody please stay in your homes; the Bangkok bomber is here.'" The police are looking for you; you should probably go and see them."

I was utterly perplexed and terrified. I have to go to a Thai police station? What if a local vigilante sees me along the way and tries to perform a citizens' arrest? Can you even do citizens' arrests in Thailand?!

Nevertheless, I dutifully drive across to the Suphanburi police station, nerves on edge. I get there, try to explain what's happened and of course nobody speaks English, so I have to wait for them to find a translator. FINALLY, after an hour of my anxiety steadily increasing to fever pitch, I'm granted an audience with the Suphanburi Chief of Police, and I explain the situation with the help of the translator, almost on the brink of tears at this point.

I think it says a lot about the Thai sense of humour that the Chief of Police found this simply the funniest story he'd ever heard - so much so that he demanded a selfie with me. This ended up on the front page of the local newspaper the next day with the headline, "Local teacher mistaken for Bangkok Bomber.""! (Photo attached for reference).

All in all, not quite the introduction to Thai culture I was looking for, but I did become a minor local celebrity out of it, and now have a GREAT anecdote to share at parties!