The Rake in Bangkok: The Market

So jerro had this really bright idea. Lets go to the market and find some cool shit to take back wiith us. Not wanting to remind him about his attempt to visit China lst week I decided to indulge. He had heard you could buy an albino crocodile there and in keeping with his attempts to go native and live in the jungle he decided he wanted a jungle pet and an albino crocodile struck him as one which would be very hard to lose. I tried explaining that a crocodile would be a very bad idea as a pet, but Jero just started talking to me in Thai, which I still do not understand. So with the help of one of the students, who Jerro has made friends with and is not in any of his classes, we headed out to ChatuChak market. As soon as we got there Jerro told me I had made a really bad decision to go to the market and proceeded to hide and not come out complaining it was too hot and crowded.

How to describe the market. When I got there I was completely shattered. I have not been sleeping well and had not really understood before I got here quite how mentally exhausting teaching 6 hours a day could be. At the University of Iowa, I had TA'd a class but those were only an hour an a half long. So to all my friends and colleagues who have gotten and pursued successful teaching careers my hat goes off to you. My state of exhaustion has not been helped by the fact that few of my students speak anything more than rudimentary English and pronounce it as badly as I pronounce the few Thai words I have learned.

Anyway, dear readers I know you have not come here to read about my life as a teacher and instead want to hear about my impressions of Thailand. I have tried to think of good way to describe the mind fuck that I found the market to be. As I said earlier I was completely shattered and was not expecting, in spite of being warned, it to be so big, hot or crowded. There were thousands of stalls selling everything under the sun, all arranged in alley ways that the mobs were funneled through with no set direction.

It reminded me a lot of that moment when you are about to lose control of your trip and the whole world seems to rush at you with an overpowering cacophany of color, sound and motion. Your only response is to be gripped with sheer terror, you feel like you are drowning and you desperately search for a surface to stick your head above and breathe.

After getting through the market alive all I could do was return to my hotel and sleep.

Enough of my whining and saying how freaking hard my life is. I should be in New Orleans and then I would have the right to complain. Here are some pictures that I took yesterday morning

A Thai stoner

The Crowd

The Dummy.

For some reason Thais seem to like these insane grinning manikins who seem to be modeled after the joker and were made to show that fashion is not only necessary it can also be a lot of fun.

Stalls