Market forces

I walked to Bangkok's Chinatown yesterday, through the visible street-smoke, resenting the fact that mere respiration is toxic here. I picked my way through alleys absolutely crammed with stalls absolutely crammed with electronics pieces; both ready-to-use and parts for assembly, and including miniature workshops where people were assembling computers and audios beside roaring traffic and heavy smoke from pork barbeques, with fans blowing above their seats that have no shielding cage (so look where you step!)

Chinatown looked no different to my untrained eye than other parts of Bangkok except for the fact that writing is in Chinese as well as Thai and there are more Chinese shrines inside the shops and lots of gaudy fat Buddhas or cartoon-smug pink doll-children figures. I really have so little understanding of what I'm looking at that I feel ashamed to call myself a traveller there. When I feel that ignorant I feel as bad as the other tourists, and am probably just as likely to cause offence unknowingly. Of course I am very respectful as much as I know how to be, but inintended offence is, I suppose, just a risk I take of being in another country.

The floors of the markets, especially the food stalls, are constantly wet, presumably from washing the food; in the meat, seafood and fish markets you never know quite what is splashing you; drips come from above half the time, which I think I've concluded are usually condensation from airconditioning in buildings overhead, but I also got sprayed a number of times by catfish or eels fighting to bury their gills in the last remaining millimetres of water in their trays.

Large buckets of baby turtles or, should you fancy one instead, full of big warty toads. Mmmm. Don't make a pig's ear of your display of pig's ears. Awful offal. Did I have the guts to ask what the guts were from? Did I get cold feet looking at all the cold feet of chickens or other animals?; feet are popular to eat apparently. It's fantastic to see people use all parts of the animal, and that there is no squeamishness around doing so. There were a number of grey nobbly masses that I couldn't identify; I think they may have been parts of brains or an organ turned inside out.

There are people grinding coconut milk (made from the hard part of the coconut plus water, not from the coconut juice), and whole stalls full of containers of strange coloured pastes, presumably thing like green and red curry powders, but I don't know how to understand the answers to the question 'nee keu arai krap?' -- what is this? Stalls of fried bananas, roasted bananas, baked bananas, but NEVER mashed bananas; red bananas, whitish ones, green ones, yellow ones; long ones short ones fat ones thin ones and any of various combinations of the above.

Typical snacks stalls are 2-bite sized thin portions of pork being barbequed on bamboo sticks over beds of charcoal, often also fish or chicken done likewise, accompanied by sticky rice if you want it (a rice variety from N.E. Thailand/Laos, eaten by the poor people of those areas as a staple, but ironically a treat for people elsewhere including foreigners; it is long-grained, and steamed, and sticks together in a well-textured lump like African porridge (pap) or Tibetan barley-dough (tsampha /ngamphe), but the single rice-grains are still visible and separable; it's quite different from overcooked normal white rice. As another snack, it's often sold sweetened, with a sauce of sweetened coconut milk, and mango slices.

Then you've got the stands that sell soups, those that sell fried rice and phad thai noodles, etc etc...and they're all mobile, pushable on wheels. The cooking ones typically appear and disappear in one spot at particular periods of the day, but there are a lot that are pushed around all day, usually selling fruit: pineapples, sold whole and more commonly chopped up in a little plastic bag with a bamboo skewer to feed yourself; papaya, durian, watermelon, pomelo....You soon learn what a good price is and I refuse to buy what I consider overpriced as I can generally find it at the typical price nearby.

OK, so I tried durian, openmindedly, and it was pretty disgusting. I think my problem was that I expected something fruity, and while sweet, it is more like potato or avocado in texture, but of course then there's the legendary stink on top of that. I almost couldn't finish my portion. It's expensive too, so although it was worth trying, I doubt I'll bother again, although I'm told it varies greatly with ripeness.

Having worshipped jackfruit in a previous blogpost, I can add with experience now that jackfruit varies considerably and it's actually quite difficult to find a good one; I was lucky that time and have only found jackfruit equivalently delicious on one occasion since. It's usually too firm, so rubbery, and not juicy enough, with thin rather than rich flavour. Which is a shame as I usually expect ecstacy again.

However, I recently discovered mangosteens, which on my first try were set to be my new infatuation. They look like tiny eggplant/aubergines, but round, and deep matte purple. About the size of smallish tomatoes. But they are hard and almost barky. The 'skin' is a good centimetre thick, and thick and fibrous, much more woody than that of an orange. It's very bitter and to be avoided. Inside it, however, are virgin white crescents of amazingly juicy flesh reminiscent of a lychee but a more mouth-watering flavour and usually no pit/pip, and not as rubbery in texture as a lychee (no lychees aren't rubbery, but imagine something even more juicily collapsible.) The flavour has to be experienced to be believed.

However, like everything that's bought fresh and grown locally by small producers from diverse genetic stock of local varieties, mangosteen varies, and you get more or less interesting ones. It's wonderful though, in this globalized world, to discover delicious fruits that for whatever reason really haven't made it, or not consistently, onto Western supermarket shelves. There is still an 'other' out there, still an 'exotic'; difference hasn't yet been erased by McDonalds (although there's one two blocks from here and here I am in an internet cafe using Microsoft). Sure, difference seems to be on its way out, and tourism and Westernization seem set on destroying many aspects of what used to mean 'Thai'. Other travellers tell me to go to Laos now while it's still not commercialized; however, I met two English travellers who said that in Laos they couldn't avoid the cartels of taxi-drivers/hotels who had monopolized whole towns to prevent travellers from getting good prices and to effectively outlaw renting of bicycles so that tourists are unable to avoid using the taxi-mafia to get anywhere. They told me of hotels where every day of the week shows a different American sit-com series, be it Friends one night, and (I don't even know the names of others) on other nights....Of course, globalization has already come to the poor, backwater country of Laos, which most Westerners have never even heard of. The 'get there before it's gone' attitude is of course a major force in making it disappear. All of that depressing stuff aside, on a personal level it is still a joy to discover tropical fruits I've never seen nor heard of....even though telling you about them is probably a globalizing force in itself.