Chiang Mai Sunday Market

The concierge at our hotel provided explicit directions to the Sunday
Market: turn left out of the hotel, make a left at the light, and
you'll see it.

In truth, it would've been impossible to miss. Chiang Mai's old city
is about half a mile on a side, and thousands of vendors, walkers,
hawkers and shoppers turn out. The streets are so packed it's
impossible to move in any direction not defined by the unrelenting
crowds. It's wall to wall.

Everything is on display: clothing, bags, jewelry, velvet paintings,
statuary, lottery tickets, the local school band, handicrafts,
greeting cards, lamps, tableware, stuffed animals...and food.

The logistics are actually quite amazing. Vendors of sausages,
skewers, phad Thai, insects, larvae, ice cream, soup, fried bananas,
Chinese dumplings and more show up with not only the food, but the
cooking devices, which in some cases are not insignificant--the pad
Thai required a Mongolian BBQ four feet across, plus a heat source,
plus a garden of herbs and condiments. The ice cream entails mobile
freezers. All this starts arriving at four in the afternoon and
vanishes around ten.

Which is when the cushy furniture comes out and everyone gets
massaged. And here I thought the Mountain View farmers' market was
impressive.

At one point--and this was kind of spooky--the loudspeaker, which had
previously been making announcements, stopped and music began to play.
Everyone--thousands of people--suddenly stopped in their tracks,
placed their arms at their sides, and gave a moment to the national
anthem. Then the chaos resumed.

The one downside to all these evening forays--and this has been
plaguing me since Vietnam--is that no matter how liberally I annoint
myself with DEET or the local herbal repellent, the Mosquitos love me.
I probably have two or three dozen bites on my legs alone at this
point. Karen has two. Fortunately, it's not malaria season and we've
been taking the drugs. But only time will tell.