God's Sufficient Grace

Chattachuk Shopping Adventure (yesterday)

This morning was quite the adventure. I’m not sure I’m up for calling it a fun adventure, but my sense of humor kept me from getting out of sorts. : )

A group from our apartment complex (hence, made up of all new teachers) decided to go to Chattachuk Market this morning. Most of them went last weekend, which I was not up to doing, and I wasn’t so much up to getting up and leaving at 8:00 this morning either but Jen, my new friend/neighbor/surrogate roommate (she lives next door and we’ve been in and out of each other’s apartments a lot), was hounding me to go, so I gave in. I didn’t sleep well last night and have been really tired all week, so I wasn’t in the peppiest of moods as we left; plus, all week the “big city-ness” (traffic, pollution, lack of green) of Bangkok has kind of been getting to me, so I was really wanting to get away from the city rather than move towards it. But on we went.

After a short-ish taxi ride to the sky-train station, we all purchased tickets and got on the already very crowded sky-train. About 2 stops into our journey, the train lingered at one of the stations. Every few minutes a voice would tell us on the loud speaker that the train was delayed because of technical difficulties and that they appreciated our patience. (Meanwhile, we stood in the train car staring into each other’s faces, which were less than a foot away, holding the rods above us.) Finally, another non-translated message was given and we saw everyone leave the train. We followed, asked around and discovered that the BTS was out of commission for a while. So down we went into the heavily polluted, traffic invested streets of Bangkok which I had hoped to avoid this weekend where we spent the next 15 minutes or so trying to make a decision as to whether to take a taxi or bus to the market (or whether to just go home!). Rebekah, one of the more gregarious of the bunch, kept approaching different Thai strangers with her Thai phrase book to ask for advice. One Thai man told us that it would probably take about 2-3 hours to get to where we were going by taxi or bus, due to the present traffic jam, but that sky train problems were usually fixed within 30 minutes, so we went back up to the sky train to wait it out and not long afterward found ourselves back in a crowded train-car.

When we got to the market, everyone (there were 10-12 of us) split up into groups to go different ways and I ended up separating from all of the groups due to the fact that they were mostly either wandering or looking for souvenirs and I actually, oddly enough, knew exactly what I wanted to get for my apartment. It didn’t take me too terribly long to make a few purchases, then find what I really wanted at this particular market: dishes. I found a beautiful set of pale green with brown trim clay pottery/stoneware (? - like mom’s brown set) dishes for my apartment. I chose the size plate, bowl and mug I wanted and also purchased a little cream/sugar set that matched and while the vendors were wrapping them all up (I got 4 sets of the dishes), I found myself day-dreaming about one day telling my grandchildren where I got them. I guess now I’ll have to tell my grandchildren the story of how I got them home as well! While I was day-dreaming, one of the men wrapping everything up asked me if I was planning to carry all of it. He had a very skeptical, “are you crazy?” look on his face. I should have taken that as a hint.

The two bags of dishes were quite heavy, and it didn’t take me very long of walking through the aisles of the market to decide that, since my hands were over-full and almost all of my cash was spent, my shopping trip was over. I called some of the others to see if they were ready to leave – we had planned to take everything home in a taxi and bypass the train – but no one was, so I headed back on my own. I really didn’t feel like spending $5-10 on a taxi by myself and I had come to discover from a cello-shopping experience a few days before that most taxi drivers don’t really want to go all the way to Bangna (where I now live) because it’s so far away. [And let me tell you, it wasn’t exactly fun wandering up and down a crowded street in downtown-ish Bangkok (ok, I don’t really know what part of town I was in!), alone, being rejected by 7 or 8 taxi drivers in a row.] So, I decided to take the sky train again.

It took me 10-15 minutes of walking to find the exit out of the market and then get to the sky-train. 10-15 minutes of lugging very heavy bags on my own – oh, and I forgot to mention that I also bought a large straw mat for my “living area” floor which, rolled up, was about as tall as I am. So you can imagine me with all my stuff, sweating in the heat, dodging people on the crowded sidewalks (or motorcycles by the side of the road), probably knocking many people with my rolled up mat, gazing longingly up at the sky-train ahead, thinking “there’s no place like my apartment, there’s no place like my apartment.”

[Side note: I realized that I must have a thing about carrying heavy purchases/bags through foreign cities: my Ukrainian tea set in Kherson, the marble ma-jong game in Beijing, our carry-on bags in Narita. You’d think I’d learn my lesson by now that “stuff” really weighs a person down.]

I lugged everything up several flights of stairs to the sky train and I can’t tell you how wonderful it felt to sit down (this was at one end of the sky-train line so it hadn’t filled up much yet) in an air-conditioned train car for the next ½ hour. When I got to the other end of the line (the market was on the complete other side of the city), I got off and went down several flights of stair to get a taxi. After I flagged down a taxi, told him my address and practically got in the car, I realized that I was out of cash and had to apologize, get out, walk down that street a bit to an ATM, get cash, flag down another taxi and drive to my apartment (where I realized that I had would have had enough cash to pay the taxi driver originally!). I lugged everything up to my 4th floor apartment where I crashed on my couch and ate left-over khow pat gui (sp?! – translation: chicken fried rice) out of my beautiful new dishes. : ) End of story.

So that’s a picture of life in Bangkok. Gone are the days when I can run multiple errands in one outing, tossing stuff into a car between stops. : )

posted by Catherine Rogers @ 7:44 AM