MARKET DAY

Sunday was Market Day in Chiang Mai. One of the arterials in Old Town was closed to automobiles, and merchants lined both sidewalks. Massive throngs of shoppers walked past stalls, tables, and blankets laden with goods. Variety was scant: almost every item was reiterated a dozen times or more. There were cheap clothes and seedy shoes, pens and pencils, little woven pouches for cell phones and cigarette lighters, toys that approached but did not directly imitate popular name-brand cartoon characters and trademarks, homemade musical instruments like hammer dulcimers, two-string fiddles and circular pan-pipes.

AN EPICUREAN PARADISE


There was all manner of food, deep-fried and stacked three deep: drumsticks, river fish, bananas, potatoes, tofu, pig parts, and including some odd surprises like chicken heads, squid sausage, tendons, and electric light bugs. There were many small tables covered with fresh fruit, with a blender in the middle and a bucket of ice underneath. There were ranks of strange fruits that shone like wax and gave off sickly-sweet odors.

“WHY YES, I CAN DEEP-FRY THAT.”


THAT’S RIGHT, FRIED CHICKENHEADS


STACKS OF WHAT-ARE-THEY


Dominating the scene were colorful tribal handicrafts like zippered pouches, skirts and scarves, mass-produced hats, and wooden frogs that went Gohp! Gohp! Gohp! when you stroked them with a polished stick.
This last was not a product confined to market day: any outdoor restaurant in Old Town invariably draws a shambling, thickset tribal woman in a mass-produced costume, with a frog and a fistful of shiny jewelry, with a loop of bracelets and crowns woven from flowers draped over one arm. She hobbles forward in an exaggerated limp and pushes the items into your field of view. If you avert your eyes she stands there like a mumbling statue, presumably entreating you to reconsider your examination of her wares. You may experience a vague guilt that someone related to one of your ancestors might have traded trinkets like these to her grandmother in exchange for riches and artifacts, but don’t be fooled: it’s crap. Even the least marginally useful item, the Gohp! Frog, has accompanied me from house to house for over ten years, and I haven’t stroked him with the stick above three dozen times. During the day the flat-faced tribal woman is accompanied by a bright-faced girlchild, who rolls her eyes, points at her mouth, and clutches her stomach as part of the act. I always give food to them if I have an easily-detachable chunk or discrete piece. It’s fun to feed children, but it’s not fun to have your emotions preyed on.
Back to the market! At the center of the boulevard, musicians lined up in single file, sitting cross-legged, and crank out wretched imitations of bubble-gum pop music, with the beat and most of the sound supplied by an amplified keyboard. The front musician inevitably had a shiny bucket soliciting donations. Each musician was blind. They made sure we knew, by leaving their empty eyesockets uncovered and smiling to the right and left. There were at least forty blind musicians in the street last night. It was an amazing illustration of the exceptionless lack of musical talent among the unsighted people of Chiangmai.
Every few steps was a new musical soundtrack. Thai pop predominated, but there was also plenty of Bob Marley, Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix, and techno, and a new kind of music I hadn’t heard before: classical tunes with an easy drum beat superimposed, and a lady singing Thai lyrics in a husky voice. I support any proliferation of ancient art, even in this weird dilution, and I’d like to get my hands on some of it. Punctuating the musical soundscape was an occasional blatting Thai voice out of a megaphone. I have so far never seen a megaphone applied in a sensible fashion. I think a megaphone conquers its owner’s soul and overwhelms that person’s judgment about what should be amplified. Another hypothesis is that hearing your own voice doubled acts as a kind of power-narcosis, a positive feedback loop the user is unable to escape. I’d like to look into getting a megaphone.
Amazingly, there were several unique items among the wares on display. They are uncommon, but the market is enormous. My detail-sensors quickly became overwhelmed at vast arrays of patches and stickers, animals carved of roots, metal gewgaws, and fabulously patterned dresses.
I bought some little strings of bells, with the idea of making a belled anklet to keep the beat. My companion, Mareva the French Masseuse, was looking for bits of jewelry to augment her exotic appearance, and settled on a little bling-barette. We ducked into a temple-courtyard that was filled with food vendors, and had green mango salad. It was amazingly spicy and pungent, accented with dried river shrimp, lime juice, hot chillies, and a thin brown gravy that could only be the essence of the Giant Water Bug Lethocerus indicus. None of my previous experiences with any Lethocerus had convinced me that they could produce the least esculence, and yet this mango salad was the perfect repast.
We were both red-faced and sweating, tongues a-loll like hot dogs, when we returned to the street. In the twenty-five minutes or so we had been eating, the volume of humans had easily tripled. Now it was impossible to move at any kind of preferred speed, and quite often someone would halt to examine a ware, bringing the whole column to a halt. Enough of these incidences on both sides of the street caused something akin to a gentle mosh-pit. Gentle, but sweaty, sticky, and unpredictable, and it was a great relief to “escape” into the automobile-choked sector and back to the mosquito-ridden guesthouse.