the old-school guestbook archives
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around and around the marketplace ~ February 5, 2003 - 4:40 p.m. I spend a lot of time in the market. partly this is because it's still an adventure for me, partly this is because I'm taking a tremendous amount of pleasure in having a room of my own, an environment to create as I please, and the money to get anything I could imagine needing. partly this is because it takes me an extremely long time to find anything specific in the market. I wander around and around. the morning market (open all day) is the place to go for most things. talat sao I tell the tuk-tuk driver, and then we haggle. I've settled on 4,000 kip as being the amount I'm willing to pay to get from my village to talat sao. that's a little less than 40 cents. some drivers will see my white skin and round eyes and ask for as much as 10,000. I laugh. I laugh a lot, when I am quoted prices. I have to bargain hard, and sometimes I still pay way too much because I'm just too tired to argue. if it's a dollar fifty or less, I generally don't bother. most things I want cost less than three dollars, when it comes down to it. if someone asks a price that's just too outrageous, I won't even haggle, I'll just laugh and walk away. talat sao is a large and somewhat dim building, with two storeys full of stalls. each stall specializes in a type of thing, (handicrafts, kitchen ware, health and beauty items, shoes, clothing...), and there are multiple clones of every type of stall. if you can't get the price you want for a thing at one stall, you can usually get it elsewhere. I go to talat sao, but I shop most often in the large, dim, one-storey building across the street. you have to step carefully in either place, because the floor is filled with gutters covered with rotting wooden planks. I wander around and around. I get lost. sometimes I want to go back to a stall and can't find it. too many times I've wound up at the foul-smelling exit where they grill pork, which has complete roasted pig heads sitting on the table, staring at you as you squeeze past. generally I just turn around and head the other way. often I don't get what I came for. this is why I go to the market a lot. I get tired, burnt out, I just can't do it anymore, and so I come back the next day. and the next. little by little, I'm finding what I need. today I was looking for sheets, a glass jar for iced coffee. maybe some t-shirts. I need t-shirts badly. mainly to wear under the sleeveless things which are the staple of my hot-weather gear. you'll see sleeveless shirts on lao people from time to occasional time, but convention says that they're inappropriate for anything but sports. as a falang, it is assumed that I will be inappropriate, and maybe that's why I'm worried about convention. but, in any case, I really must dress appropriately at work, so I'm buying myself some t-shirts. today, a purple tie-dye, and another kind of purple with a somewhat artsy design of flowers and dragonflies. I gave up on the glass jar for now, because I was being quoted ridiculous prices. five, six dollars. the bedsheets are another matter, that deserves some more thought. I do have a bedsheet (asians generally don't use a top one), it's just pink and flowery and hideous next to the gorgeous blanket I paid too much for yesterday. but the prepackaged ones in the marketplace are, for the most part, just as hideous. but today I suddenly realized that the piles of raw cloth next to the prepackaged ones are probably for ordering custom-made sheets. I looked for a sewing machine, and there it was. I'm dreaming of jersey-knit sheets, both bottom and top, but the whole enterprise requires more thought. do I need to measure my bed? how do I get them to understand what I want? what's the going rate for custom sheets? I may have to bring a lao friend with me for this one. today I also didn't quite buy groceries, but I began to see how I could buy groceries. I walked by the stalls selling dried and prepackaged foodstuffs, and gave them a good, hard look. saw things I recognized, things I could use as the base of a meal, along with the fresh produce which is everywhere. lentils, cooking oil, fresh garlic, shallots, noodles... I'm working my way towards it. so far I've been living on restaurant meals (usually around a dollar) and the traveling food I brought with me, dried soups and things all the way from milwaukee, wisconsin. it's all coming together. I taught my first creative writing class with the third graders today. I had them play the game where you pass a paper around and everyone writes a couple lines of the story. four groups, four stories, all of them just too adorable. two of the stories were about me. just too sweet. I wanted dinner at my favorite vegetarian hole-in-the-wall next to the market, but it seems they close by late afternoon. the wrinkled and lovely proprieteress grinned at me as I peeked in, passed me a couple of chunks of sugar cane to chew on. "tomollow," she said, the first word of english I've heard from her. "yes, tomorrow," I said and smiled.
(((rings))) |