Partway through the tour of the Damnoen Saduak floating market, my tour guide grabbed my sleeve and said, “After you go train market.” I asked here where I was going, but she’d already turned and walked off. After what? After this, I’m going to the train market? After I go to the train market, am I supposed to do something? And whats a train market?
I puzzled over that one for the next 20 minutes, trying to figure out if there was missing punctuation in her sentence and what a train market was. I tried saying “train market” in different accents, trying to figure out what she was actually saying. Ultimately, I never figured it out.
When we left the floating market, we walked towards the van we took when we left Bangkok. The tour guide squeezed through the group and grabbed me by the arm. She walked me to a different van and told me to ride shotgun. She then returned to the first group and herded them onto the van. (As I eventually figured out, she had two vans of people, and she just wanted to split us up more evenly so we weren’t as cramped on the way back as we were on the way down.) After driving for about 15 minutes, we stopped in a busy neighborhood and the driver told us to get out. He told us to go down a narrow alley and we could take pictures. He told us what time to be back on the bus and waved us on our way. As we walked down the alley that was barely a foot wider than my shoulders, I still wasn’t entirely sure what we were walking into. Until we got to the other end of the alley, which opened up into the train market.
[Click on any image to enlarge. Please. It took me 3 days to figure out how to do that.]
| Sure enough, it was a market built up around unused train tracks, with vendors on either side. This market, unlike many, was dedicated solely to food, with no other wares in sight. |
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Vegetables and fish… |
| … shrimp, conveniently sitting in direct sunlight (although they were on ice. I saw a lot of other fish at other stalls that weren’t)… |
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… fried grubs… |
| … and some kind of paste which really didn’t look appetizing. Maybe it’s a topping for the grubs. |
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As we walked the tracks, taking photos, and enjoying the smell of seafood warming in the sun between two buildings with no moving air (I heard one woman retch and I watched her run for an alley to exit the market), I admired the fact that they kept the track area clear as a pedestrian path. But, as that thought went through my head, I heard an announcement over a speaker that sounded suspiciously like a train conductor speaking Thai. As I watched, the vendors, previously lethargic, sprung into action. Apparently the tracks weren’t as unused as I’d thought.
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The vendors shifted the supports that kept the awnings in place so they moved back, away from the tracks. |
| As they pushed their wares back, I saw that each vendor was on a platform on a set of tracks that ran perpendicular to the train tracks, so they could slide in and out of place with ease. |
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And then, there was the train. |
| Yep, that train’s coming. |
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It was close enough to lick. [*] |
| And then it was gone |
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Within a few minutes, all of the goods had been pushed back into place and the awnings were hanging over the tracks, providing needed shade to the vendors (and inadvertently trapping the fish smell at ground level) |
It was pretty cool to see how they made use of the space, especially with their own moving platforms to back away from the tracks when it came through. I’m guessing that it doesn’t come as often as the #2 train in Manhattan, of course. But even if it’s an hourly event, it’s still something that we’d never see in the US. We have more space, so we are unlikely to feel the need to crowd the tracks like that. And American health inspectors would shut something like that down in a heartbeat. I guess that most Americans prefer their seafood with a little less “train exhaust.”
