Weekend Bazaar

July 10:
Woke up at 5, body said it was 1900 and sick of listening to a soi dog carrying on at nothing, so I puttered until a little after 7, which seemed a reasonable time to get underway. But the grates were still down and there was someone asleep on a couch next to the computers, so I sent emails until we were open for business. I set out for the Tesco, “Thailand's Wal Mart,” to find a water boiler, insta-noodles, soda, maybe something else that looked attractive. It was south of town on the other road, but I had no idea what that

meant, so I emptied my pack, slung my camera, and had a disconcerting sense of last year's travels in Italy. And then I hit the main road, was almost hit by a sawatee and balked at the signage in a language less decipherable than Sanskrit (which is simpler and easier).

Some blocks away, I came across an abnormally dense cluster of tents. It was on the far side of the other road, and the general buzz—whether tangibly audible or a sense of the energy I couldn't say-- a dull roar that overwhelmed the traffic. I could see maybe four stalls, and the odd thing was that each had a substantially different product: a smoking grill, brake parts, tee shirts, purses. And the vendors were a little bit too close together, even by Thai standards, so the people filing between slipped sideways past each other. And behind that roadside row, the vendors disappeared into a smoky dimness packed with people pushing and reaching and pointing and squeezing.

Entering the weekend bazaar compares with no other terrestrial experiences. It might compare to scuba diving in terms of the overwhelming sensory experience, but there is no strange life support equipment to remind you that you're not in Kansas anymore; you're walking on your own two feet, breathing the same thickly humid air, but suddenly your ears are no longer able to process the roar of stimuli any more than your nose can decide whether to sniff deeply or plug up and run (pun neither intentional nor inappropriate).

At the roadside edge of the bazaar, things are safe: plain shirts, Soi Miss shoes, grilled things on a stick. But as your eyes adjust to the gloom under the corrugated metal roofing suspended between rough-log frames and your ears perceive a huge mass of life before focusing on the immediate vicinity, your nose explodes. You're next to a smoking barbecue, of course, you always are when in such a conglomeration, but the scent runs much deeper: there's leather, oil, woodsmoke, charcoal, the inevitable acrid rot of a Thai street, grilling meat, the iron tang of raw meat, an oppression of people, and durian. Lots of durian.

Better people than I have devoted many words to describing, condemning, hailing, and otherwise lauding durian. I make no judgments as I have not tried it as of yet, but suffice it to say, its smell cuts through the atmosphere like lilac, overlaying everything else with its presence.

And then there are the dozens of food tents, perfume tents, people making seasoning pastes, people making fish sauce, every sort of fruit and vegetable in current agricultural production, every sort of pig and bird in various levels of butchering, all intermixed with clothign and shoes and CDs and people packed and flowing with the chaotic symmetry of a school of sardines. Mot of the dry-goods vendors sit amid their wares, and occasionally you'll look up from a pile of shoes or a pyramid of rambutans like rainbow-hued cockleburrs designed to incapacitate mammoths to see a tiny prune of a woman wearing clothes of indistinct origin—which does not mean it's hard to tell if they're name-brand or knockoff, but that it's hard to tell whether they belong to Western, Thai, or Indigenous tradition—sitting crosslegged and regal among her heritage and legacy. Okay, that takes some backpedaling.

Chances are, an eighty-year-old woman started selling Chinese-made cotton tee shirts when they were just hitting the Thai market. But her parents were probably peddlers of some sort, as were their parents, and on back to a royal ancestor. And anyone amid farmed goods almost certainly has more history of farming than America has a history of Europeans.

While you've been gawking, the ambient currents of humanity have carried you into the bowels of the bazaar. Things start getting weird.

Drygoods give way to very, very non-dry things—a tiny hand more smoky and wrinkled than an almond hurtles a hatchet blackened with gore through beef ribs while sitting crosslegged next to a boneless pig's face. And things just get weirder: not even in Thailand is the stall with liver, stomach, kidney, segments of veins, vats of squirming grubs, inch-long larvae, or freshly-skinned frogs tied in bushels of five by one back leg that occasionally kicks and sends the bushel into the gutter, not even Thais, who grew up eating such things, want that one out curbside.

And then come the fish. Most striking is that they're still moving. It's the same setup, with a wizned little woman sitting amid a hemisphere of heritage, but the fish are lumped into plastic bins by category: first by species, then by degree of butchery, and every batch of intact specimens still displays life. Lungfish crawling away across the gutter, catfish flopping, carp gasping, sleek and nastily-toothy predators flopping, softshell crabs fighting string binders. And nowhere is there a “normal” species: the prawns are lobster-sized with antennae waving about, the local lobsters look more like aquatic lizards, the aquatic lizards are the only things actually truly dead—decapitated to prevent escape, presumably—and then every species pulled up by a fisherman's net—sharks, rays, skates, cephalopods, and species of fish that look like something that would attack you from a nightmare of being tangled in a low-visibility scuba diving hell.

And then a callused little hand reaches into the writhing mass, pulls out a desperately protesting specimen, and, depending on the variety of fish and customer, either clubs it thoroughly or begins either skinning or hacking it to pieces. It goes into a plastic bag, and after a brief exchange, money changes hands, first from the customer and then in return. And the customer pockets the change without seeming to notice that it came from a wad through which a hand had been rifling all day without interruption or ablution between rifling through aquatic entrails.

I'll confess that the sight gave me resolve to buy a container of hand sanitizer at the earliest possible opportunity.

Still, how amazing to see fish go from living at one stall to grilled on a stick at the next. And scrumptious, at least based on last night's dinner.

(Dinner last night was a smoked catfish with veggies and sticky rice. And a yum guhn salad—a menu would say “Spicy Green Papaya Salad.” To make it, approach the push-cart and smile at the [surprise!] young and attractive girl. She's standing behind what looks like a prairie-dog metropolis of ratholed containers—peppers and peanuts and a swath of fluids that don't bear consideration beyond enjoyment. She dumps out a mortar like an antique vase [vahs] with a capacity of a quart and a half, then ladels in a few chilis, a clove of garlic, some lime and a bit of shallot. She looks up and points at little softshell crabs while raising her eyes—just nod and smile while the little black thing goes into the mix. She pounds away for a while before grabbing a mini-ladle—a metal scoop about the volume of a Chinese-style soup spoon—and scooping in a series of fluids while pounding with the other hand. Next come fried or dried shrimp—who's to tell what the little micro-sized dealies have gone through?--and peanuts that, if you're lucky, are freshly-roasted with the occasionally blackened bit. Then a handful of juillienned papaya and a dabbling of carrot, a final stir, and she ladels it onto a plate. And the smoked fish? Clean it, stuff it with galangal and lemon wrapped in a banana leaf, and put it over smoke until the flavor the entire whoopty-do is a beautiful smoky gold.)

And through this, I reveled. Never before have I experienced above-average height, but, unlike most of my genetic bretheren, I was not tall enough to catch my head on the tents or corrugated metal roofs. Instead of a forest of armpits, I could stand tall and see across a sea of heads. And I was stared at not because I'm short and especially skinny but because I was the only farang in the bazaar.

I stopped at one stall when a bushel of skinned frogs hopped in front of me. As I looked at the offerings, the snaggletoothed proprieress started speaking. I shook my head and said what I think meant, “language Thai” while making the cut-off sign, then nodded and smiled while saying, “Ang-rit, Ang-rit.” Bless her heart, she pantomimed the process of preparing what I was inspecting: little styrofoam trays lined with leaves and stacked with little plastic baggies, all wrapped in plastic. She pointed at one baggie that looked like it held woodshavings (or maybe some sort of roasted grub, which was not quite so pleasant), and then at the noisy stall next door, where a man was shredding out coconuts on a grinder run by a two-stroke engine.

“Ohh, toasted coconut—the real version!”

You take some of that, then some of this other stuff that looks like a kiss or sparkles on your lips—the baggie is full of micro peppers, wedges of line, garlic, and shallot—and some dried shrimp, place them on a leaf, drizzle on some sauce, and eat the lot.

I could've looked more quizzical, I'm sure. Just don't ask how.

The lady ripped off a chunk of leaf and handed it to me. I blew a gasket.

Once, early in my conscious memory, Dad and I were on a walk. He found some fresh miner's lettuce, and ripped off a couple leaves for us to share. At the time, I was already fervently anti-veg, but the crispy, water, freshness washed me with a sense of springtime.

The chunk of a broad, deciduous leaf indistinguishable to my eyes from any of its tropical relatives did the same for my tastebuds: the wrinkled little hand passed me a sample of verdant vivacity in palatable form. Then the hand ripped off another chunk of pure joyous life, dipped it in some sauce, and passed it to me: honey with toasted sesame seeds and a salty sort of smoky richness that bears savoring without contemplating.

I handed the woman a hundred-Baht note and accepted a fifty in return without question.

At another stall, I pointed at a bushel of mini bananas, and when I held up three fingers, the lady looked at me as though I were martian, not just the only farang she'd see ever in the day, let alone at her stall. But I only wanted three, not three dozen. A passerby said, “you only want three?” and then something in Thai. They both laughed at my smiling-faced expense, but the lady solemnly cut off three and the good samaratan said, “She only want three baht. But you stupid, you get all for ten.”

I shook it off: a bushel of bananas for 10B, about 35 cents? Right.

Then I stopped to buy some rambutans: I pointed to the stack, which were under a hand-penned 35 on a folded and stained cardboard sign. The lady raked an armful into a bag and held it over to my balking face. Too late, though, and I handed her a hundred-Baht note. Sixty-five change: the thirty-five mean for a kilo. Just over a kilo for fresh, hand-harvested rambutans. Twenty for a kilo of mangosteens as sweet and juicy as garlic is savory and potent.

Maybe one day I'll be brave enough to point at one of the squirming shrimp. Or at least at a pork chop. And who knows? Maybe I'll hook up with a hot native and learn what to do with pig nerves, beef tongue, or hopping frog. But I'm not sure which is less likely, so until then I'll content myself with smiling stupidly at the smiling car attendants who dutifully prepare me yum gun, spicy green papaya salad, and strips of seasoned meat over rice, then marvel that I relish every crunshy, burning bite and come back to point at the peppers and shrug my shoulders to say, “what gives?”

I've been careful not to go back, though. For one, there are always at least four buckets of peppers, and I get only a pinch from the first, which is enough to set even my mouth aflame. For two, I usually point at what looks like inch-thick strips of deep fried bacon, which is then stir-fried with veggies. They have many more buckets and tubs than I can see, and I've already been experimenting at the edge of comfort. Some bit of sanity tells me I'm okay with tongue, tripe, liver and vein because I've had them all before; fresh-fried grub coated in the runoff from fermented fish is a bit much when I can't say, “What the hell was that?”

Let's not get into the sea lice, cockroaches, grasshoppers, and really large sorts of beetlish something or others I saw at the bazaar. Rambutans, bananas, Thai leaf wraps with dried shrimp, and stories are enough for now.