In the Market for some Variety
2nd October, Bangkok, Thailand
If, for some strange reason, you found yourself of a weekend with hours to kill and a shopping list that included 5 live snakes, a couple of opium pipes, a few new DVDs, an 8-foot-tall welded metal Predator sculpture and a selection of kitchen utensils, I know just the place to go: Chatuchak Market.
Also referred to as Jatujak Market, this is the huge, and I mean huuuuuge market that takes place in the northern suburbs of Bangkok, with as many as 15,000 different market stalls that cater for roughly 200,000 visitors on each day of the weekend. Really, this place is just incredible, and you have to allow a whole day to see what's on offer.
We arrived at around 11:30, a good few hours after the stalls opened, but that still gave us hours to look around. I'm not sure what gate we entered through, but there was a a map of the stalls which were sorted into different sections much like you'd expect in a department store, except that each section here was larger than most department stores' entire floor space. We walked around for about an hour, forever taking random turns down different sois (alleyways), then came back out into the open (the stalls are in covered areas that get mighty hot, it has to be said) to discover that we'd managed to advance maybe a couple of hundred yards from the first gate. At this point I realised just how vast this market is.
Chatuchak Market: This is just the merest shaving of a snowflake sat on
top of the very tip of the iceberg, so to speak.
Invariably, as we walked around the market, we saw some of the same items in different stalls, but not as much as I had expected. There was so much choice for people living in Bangkok to set out their homes with, and plenty, too, for the tourist to take home. We, on the other hand, found ourselves dismissing most of the potential purchases because they would be too big to carry around with us for the next couple of months or too heavy/large to send back. Still, it was good to window shop (well, if they had windows, but you get the idea). There was a sizeable pets section, too, with all manner of breeds of cats and dogs for sale. Some of them were absolutely tiny, and possibly too young to have been taken from their respective mothers. Having said that, they appeared to be well cared for and in good health. One of the funniest memories I'll have of this market is seeing a couple of Schitzu puppies whose faces were crammed into the corner of a cage (an open frame, not enclosed) right next to a pedestal fan. They had the coolest spot in the market, I reckon, and the fur on their face was blowing in all directions. When those two grow up, they'll definitely be the type to ride in a car with their heads hanging out of the window!
For Sale: a smog mask, fake Luis Vuitton, essential for those stuck-in-traffic,
breathing-in-exhaust-fume tuk-tuk moments (and there are a lot of them in
Bangkok).
All in, we spent a good 6 and a half hours walking around the stalls, and managed to double-back on ourselves somewhere on the line, although it's difficult to say where. I saw some people with guide books for the market, and wondered just how they managed keep themselves oriented. We, on the other hand, just kept walking and walking until our legs couldn't take any more and we had to get a tuk-tuk back to base (Stef and Am's place).