Day 4: Chatuchak Weekend Market

Saying that the weekend market is big is completely true. It also fails completely to give the right sense of the place, as do my pictures here. It’s vast. A heaped mass of commerce filled with everything imaginable. And in such variety of everything! Clothing from traditional Thai fisherman pants, to the ubiquitous traveller elephant pants to jeans, to edgy t-shirts featuring Ronald McDonald vomitting, leatherwear, sneakers, sarongs, to hippy-wear and on and on. All sold in individual tiny stalls. They don’t have the clothing you want? Buy the fabric directly and stitch it yourself.

And so on for every kind of good imaginable.

The market itself consists of a mini, pedestrian-scale city with districts for house wears, clothing, furniture, etc.. There are thoroughfare roads on the ‘city grid’ and warrens of stalls on in inside, where the buildings would be if you were looking at a map of a city. The inside stalls are tiny, often just 6ft across, and they are numberless. The stalls with prime locations facing the outside pedestrian paths are much larger and include most of the food.

It’s ponderous to think about the analog of this in western countries. Surely there isn’t more aggregate trade here. Economic stats don’t seem to support that notion. Does this commerce all happen in malls? They seem too small. Online? Even this Amazon junkie doesn’t think so. Is it just that it’s more decentralized? Would a Weekend market in Seattle look like this if all the local malls were glued together? The buying and selling of goods here is so much more in the open, it feels like it’s everywhere. So much more thrilling.