To Market, To Market

To Market, to Market,

And Round About the Village

Open-air markets are everywhere in Thailand, but not all are open all the time.  In my village, the market is only on Mondays, in the late afternoon and early evening.  In a previous post (“Say Wat?”), you saw pictures of our village’s two temples.  The weekly market is set up in a field just opposite the grounds of Wat Sirinamaram.  The market offers an impressive range of items, given the small size of the village – besides meat, produce, and freshly cooked or baked items (curries, soups, salads, desserts), you can buy clothing, shoes, junk food, toys, kitchen utensils, cleaning supplies, personal hygiene items, bug spray, CDs, DVDs, and much more.  Here are a few photos to give you a glimpse of what it looks like:

I don’t know who decides which food vendors sit on the ground while others get a stall or table, but presumably there is a fee for each category. Some vendors from the area make the rounds of different markets throughout the week, as I discovered by visiting weekly markets in nearby villages. Besides the wide variety of fried or grilled meat, chicken, and fish items (photo on right) and other prepared foods, a self-respecting market in northeastern Thailand must offer a selection of fried or roasted bugs, as in the photo below.

Sorry, but I can’t tell you what kind of bugs or worms these are or how they taste – being a vegetarian, I haven’t partaken of these, um, menu items.  The play area for children (below left) is available most every week, and there are barkers who keep up a running banter over loudspeakers, giving the market a festive feeling, a little bit like at a county fair.  The snake show has only been there once that I know of (photo below right).

You can see the cobra curled up on a corner of the mat while its owner works the crowd, trying to collect as much money as possible before the performance. I didn’t stay to watch, having seen the snake show last summer at King Cobra Village near Khon Kaen, which mainly made me feel sorry for the snakes. After removing them from their boxes (like the one here), the handlers goaded the cobras to strike, picked them up, slung them around their necks, put their heads (the snakes’ heads) briefly into their mouths (the handlers’ mouths), and performed other maneuvers that are not for the squeamish (not saying that anyone reading this is squeamish, but the writer might be). The snakes were quick to dive back into their boxes when their shift was over.  Here is a link to the web site for more about King Cobra Village if you are interested, or you can google to find YouTube videos of parts of the show:

http://www.tourismthailand.org/See-and-Do/Sights-and-Attractions-Detail/Ban-Khok-Sanga-king-cobras-village--3478

Back to my village: during the week, you can buy some groceries and other necessities at one of the numerous little stores, such as those in the photos below.

 The stores in the pictures are only a half a block from my house, and I usually shop at both each week.  The one above left is similar to a convenience store. It sells drinking water (tap water in Thailand is not safe to drink) and other drinks, household supplies, toiletries, school supplies for children, random toys, and a large array of snacks and junk food, but no meat or produce. Also, you can take your cell phone and internet access cards there to be “topped up” – the usual way to pay these bills here.  So I buy my drinking water at this store, pay to have my sim card topped up, and buy my favorite Extra Barbecue Potato Chips when I’m craving salt after a sweaty bike ride. 

The store in the picture above right is a grocery store, where you can buy whatever vegetables and fruits are in season, fresh eggs, and meat (pork, chicken, and fish most days). I buy tomatoes, little eggplants, squash, and other vegetables here, and maybe a watermelon once in a while. (Jeanette’s Rule for Buying Fruit: Don’t buy bananas, especially when they are abundant and already ripe, because as soon as you do, at least three people will give you large bunches from the banana trees in their yards.) 

Every village I’ve been to in Thailand has a goodly number of little “mom and pop” stores like the ones pictured above, often three or four in the same block, or right across the street from each other. Presumably each has regular customers and the people who run the stores don’t depend solely on income from sales to support their families. In towns and cities, the role of the convenience store has largely been taken over by 7-Elevens (called simply “Sewen” by Thais), but I haven’t seen them in villages yet.

Two more stores to round out this mini-tour of my village: the little station where motorcycles buy fuel, and the bike repair shop:

Some of our 5^th-grade students happened to see me taking the picture of the motorcycle fueling stop and called out “gas station!” (one of the words they learned in our unit about the village), a moment to warm any teacher’s heart.  In the photo of the bike repair shop, the proprietor is working on a motorcycle (called “motocy” in Thai), but you can tell from the pile of tires that he also repairs bicycles.  He replaced my inner tube and patched the old one for 20 Baht (30 Baht = about $1 US) – I would gladly have paid more, because even though I had a spare inner tube and bike tools provided by the Peace Corps, it would have taken me an hour or more to do it myself, while he did it in less than ten minutes. 

There’s more to tell about where I live, but today I wanted to show you that many of the things we need can be bought right here, round about the village, within minutes of our homes.