SYNOPSIS:

Based on a true story and written as a film or a TV series:

After discovering her husband is having a cliche affair with a 22-year-old bleached-blonde, journalist Shelly Wellington (funny, flirtatious and a bit neurotic--a Sandra Bullock-type from her films like Speed and Miss Congeniality) accepts a job in Bangkok to write a fluff travel piece on medical facilities for an international magazine. The long-time affair she found her husband having couldn't come at a worse time for her self-esteem as she's about to turn 40, and it's just after she quit her job as a magazine editor to become mostly a house wife--upon his urging!

Now in Thailand (the country where partying is synonymous with the region), Shelly's not feeling much pain after finding Thai pharmacies, discovering their specialty brews and hanging out in a grungy area called "Walking Street" where anything goes. She starts to do this to hide from her depression and begins to live it up, especially since she booked three weeks for a story that will only take a few days to research and write. While only in the country for a few days, however, she finds herself in trouble. It's her birthday and she decides to go to an international bar owned by an American. She is drinking, a lot, and dancing with cute guys from various nations when she realizes her passport and money have been lifted from her hidden money belt. Frantic, she must find at least her passport and immediately finds the bar owner to tell him it's been stolen. He tells her to go up the street to where the Tourist Police Station is (in Thailand, there are real Thai police and then there are Tourist Police, with the latter just glorified tourist guides). Shelly knows the moment she leaves the bar so does her passport and, worse, someone in the bar has it. So she asks the owner to call the Thai police, but he refuses. She previously learned that once the Thai police get involved in a situation, everyone is suspect and no one can leave the area of the incident. Knowing this, she asks the owner in what situation would he call the Thai police? He tells her in incidents where there is a fight or ones involving many people. With his refusal to call them, Shelly, drunk and with nothing to lose, picks up a vase and throws it at the wall. The owner immediately yells at her to stop or her will.. "What, call the police," she finishes his statement for him. She then picks up a glass and throws it at the wall, saying "I will break ever fucking thing in this place until you've had enough and call in the real police because you know once I leave here, so does my passport!" The owner finally calls the real police and in less than a minute a Thai woman says she found her passport on the floor, under the woman's foot. "She must have dropped it," the woman tells the arriving police. Of course all her money is gone, but the Thai police quickly ascertain the situation and quell it. Having no money, the police give her a ride to their station so they can call her a cab and get her back to her hotel. "Don't ever come back," the American bar owner yells at her as she is escorted out. "Like I ever would knowing how you treat your own people, and I wouldn't be surprised if you are in on it," she was thinking at first, but then wound up saying out loud.

Between site-seeing tours and tourist trips, Shelly works on her story. She meets some cool and some not-so cool people on these outings, and gets into the occasional conflict--sometimes due to her continued altered state, which helps distract her from the reality of her home life--but is having fun! On a four-day trip to Pattaya Beach, she receives two emails from the U.S. State Department while checking out to go back to Bangkok. One states there will be demonstrations in the country (a.k.a. the country has become embroiled in civil war) and tells those outside of Bangkok not to come back and those inside not to leave their hotels. The second states the State Department is shutting down. Confused, she asks a waiter at the hotel to explain what is going on. Essentially she learns the country is split between those who like and those who don't like the Thai prime minister, largely because he is trying to impose a vat tax on street-sale venders that will take money away from these already poor families. The situation has been getting so bad that whenever there is mention of a "demonstration," it turns into outright battles with the Thai army. She also learns that one tactic the rebels use is to take tourists hostage because Thailand's largest GDP is tourism and to do so is a way to keep people from coming into the country and planning trips there. The idea is this will cripple the country's economy and the rebels can take control over the broke government that will have a reduced or even dismantled army.

Shelly now realizes her life is in danger as mobs (known as Red Shirts) freely roam the country, taking tourists hostage; shutting down airports, businesses, hotels and conventions; and attempting to kill the prime minister--all in the presence of the full Thai army. With the embassy closed, Shelly's on her own as far as American aide goes. She does meet a couple of friends, but mostly encounters one odd character after another. One friend is the waiter from the beach hotel who helps her find an apartment since she can't afford to stay at that four-star hotel indefinitely. Named Mario Ocampo (late 20s, funny, likes to party, a bit silly and nerdy--the Filipino version of Grant Gustin in The Flash), he becomes her confidant (sidekick). She's also friends with a couple of Mario's friends and as well with an attorney she winds up working with, Tan Bunnag (mid-40s, trustworthy, straight-laced, yet open-minded and a bit attracted to her, like Kevin Spacey in American Beauty).

While there, which she has no idea how long that will be, the fighting becomes more aggressive. There is a direct attempt to assassinate the prime minister while he is walking to his car, and his assistant is shot directly in the head instead. Shelly realizes getting lit day and night is not helping her, and so she begins to straighten up by cutting back on her drinking and pill-popping and getting serious about the conflict that isn't going away. The three weeks she was supposed to be in Thailand for had already come and gone, and it really hit home that she may be stuck there for a long time. The airports are reopening, but then quickly getting shut down again, and the threat of getting taken hostage hit too close to home when a convention, less than a mile from her apartment, is overrun by rebels and the people at the convention are chased out under threat. To avoid further conflicts, she must extrapolate Thai culture and learn to survive in this foreign world with societal rules different than those she is accustomed to in America. While she keeps finding herself mixed up in strange, hilarious and sometimes scary situations, she begins devising an escape plan that will eventually get her home four months later.