Of course we shopped. Our attempts at shopping in Vietnam had been stymied, so we had gift lists to complete and baht burning holes in out money belts. (Just kidding, we didn’t use money belts. They’re lame. Maura had one, but I wouldn’t let her use it. Then there were our water filtration gadgets. Maura’s never worked and mine was so big that it didn’t fit in my suitcase. So the best laid plans . . . are usually a waste of time.)
Our first and favorite market was the Suan Lum Night Market. I think it may be a relatively new market because it barely got a mention in out guidebooks, and only in one of them. But it was the bomb. It was a whole complex of one-storey buildings that we walked around and through, finding all sorts of treats. Cute crafts, great décor, cute dress shops with Asian-chic clothes. And pretty much everything was less than $10. It’s hard to argue with that. It also had open air bars and restaurants set up in the middle and I think we could have happily spent the night sipping German beer neath the giant light-up Suan Lum Market tower. We loved it so much the first night, we went back for more the next night. One of the main reasons for going back was because Maura had the opposite of buyer’s remorse for passing up some little soaps. They had cost $2 each and Maura, comparing that cost to the cost of everything else thought it quite expensive. We spent the better part of 45 minutes looking for those g-d soaps, trying to systematically go through each building, all of which looked the same, and find the place we had been the night before. Of course, we were also spending money on other goodies along the way. When we finally got there, the people said the price was 10 baht higher (30 cents) than the night before! I think Maura was waivering on whether to pay this exorbitant new rate, but I told her she kinda had to. We were not leaving that place without many, many soaps.
The other, more famous, market was the Chatuchak Weekend Market. This market is the Big Thing that all the guidebooks tell you to do. But as far as I am concerned, it was a poor man’s version of our night market. First, it was a good 20 degrees hotter. Though I suppose that cannot be blamed on the market, since it was, after all, bright daylight. More importantly, though, the crap to quality ratio here was much more skewed to crap. Don’t worry, we still managed to find a few trinkets to buy. In its favor, the Chatuchak Market makes up for its deficiencies with great people watching. While there were loads of tourists there, it was also clearly a place that locals go there to do their weekend shopping. I was quite happy sitting at a little bar stand in the shade watching the staff and watching shoppers go by.
