Chatuchak weekend market

Today I decided to visit the Chatuchak weekend market in Chatuchak park. I wanted to pick up some souveniers and eat some street food.

The market is absolutely massive and has the feel of an outside fair. It is divided up into a few sections each of which is devoted to a different group of items (pets, food, used clothing, bags, souveniers, collectibles, books, silk and fabrics and so on).

I didn't really have an agenda so I just started right in. The booths are very interesting. They are all covered by a common roof and they have walls that separate them that are more or less made from the merchandise they are selling. Many of them have a stereo playing and you can kind of tell what they are selling based on the music. The teen stuff will have techno and hip hop, and the sandals will have more relaxed Thai pop music.

Everyone greets you and tries to entice you into their shop with a smile and perhaps a gesture toward their merchandise. I even had one salesman put a fan on me to cool me off.

(quick aside) It's much better than the other day when Jim and I were in the biggest electronics store I've ever seen (think Fry's with 6 stories) where vendors would try to get me to purchase bootleg CDs and DVDs. At first, they say "movies, DVDs" but as they saw that wasn't working, they started to tug on my shirt and say "sexy movies" and "sex" which made me laugh out loud. It's best to just pretend none of that is happening and look at what you want to look at. I still laugh at the one guy who cam up behind me and grunted "sexy movie!" with some desperation.

Anyway, it's hot in those booths and the roof doesn't help. There is no airflow and they are packed with heat producing people.


After buying a pair of pants cut to my calves (good for biking!) for $5, I stepped outside for something to drink. A woman was selling what looked like a Thai version of agua frescas but I didn't know what the flavors were. The first tasted like green grass so I opted for the better known coconut.

Next to her was a booth selling many different meats and fruits. I was hungry so I asked for the chicken soup. It was a thick broth (think the consistency of hot and sour soup) in a styrofoam bowl packed with veggies and assorted items. I added some spices to it and gave it a taste. Wow, it was really good. As I kept spooning through it, I noticed there was a chicken foot in my spoon. Then a liver (or kidney). And the whole soup had tiny hard boiled eggs in it. I tried hard not to be grossed out and instead decide to embrace the unknown.


Chicken feet are not very good. They are tiny bones wrapped with cooked skin and not much else. More there to flavor the broth I think. The kidney-thing doesn't have much taste at all and a velvety texture. The eggs were good. I took some photos of the soup and the booth.

For most of this, I wore my binaural mics because I wanted to record the experience of moving through all the sights and sounds of the vendors and the music.

Anyway, real quick, the other things of note that I ate during the day were banana pancakes (recommended to me by a friend). They are wrapped up like a small crepe cone, sort of crispy (cooked in a lot of oil), and have sweetened condensed milk on them (delicious).


After the chicken soup episode, I decided to really expand my horizons when I saw a booth where a woman had five bins of cooked insects. I ordered a grab bag that contained some of everything. They were grubs and locusts of different lengths and thicknesses, all cooked in oil with a kind of soy or fish broth coating. They were actually pretty good. Greasy more than anything else.


The taste was fine and the texture was even ok. The one annoyance was that the exoskeleton didn't go down as easy as the rest so after eating a lot, you'd have this "exo-cud" in your mouth to deal with.


I was in the market for about 6 hours and hardly saw everything. I think the pets section was my favorite. There were puppies and fish and roosters and rodents (even hedgehogs!). In the chicken section, I turned a corner into a cock fight. There was a very small area the size of a childrens' inflatable swimming pool with men all around watching the action. One of the cocks definitely had the advantage and kept stabbing his beak into the other's neck. There was very little blood actually, but it was clear one of the cocks would lose so at one point, a man pulled them out of the area.

I was totally beat after that much time in the sun so I hopped the MRT (subway) and headed back home.