Markets of Chiang Mai

There are a number of different markets that we visited in Chiang Mai. There's the gaudy Night Market that caters to tourists without discerning taste, the fun (but ephemeral) weekend markets, the myriad morning markets for fresh foods, and the plentiful temporary markets that sprung up just for Loy Krathong.

I've already mentioned several of these markets, but this post will focus on the market experience in Thailand a bit more, as well as some of the activities we did at the markets. First, let's talk about the best markets in Chiang Mai (for a tourist with discerning taste—I hope!)

Sunday Walking Street

The Sunday (and Saturday) Walking Streets are weekend night markets that occur on major roads through the middle of the city. I have no idea why they are called "Walking Streets" in Chiang Mai. I don't know if that trend happens in the rest of the country, but it seems ferociously clung to by tourists and tourist paraphernalia alike. I have no idea what Thai people call it in Thai, so maybe it's just a quirk of the guidebooks.

Anyhow, the entire street gets shut down and vendors start unpacking and setting up in the early afternoon, eventually lining both sides of the street with carts and tables and piles of merchandise, food, snacks, souvenirs, musical instruments, art, clothing, crafts, and so on. Musicians and beggars tend to gather in the center of the street, and the Wats in the area open up their temple grounds to even more vendors. The food courts with actual seating areas are usually found in the Wat courtyards, and diners there are subjected to constant reminders by a monk on a loudspeaker. I guess he's saying, "Remember to donate money tonight. It is holy to make merit. Making merit is good for your soul. We have a new bin for donations, if you haven't seen it yet…," and so on. (There are always more donation buckets at the Wats than I can imagine a need for.) Anyhow, these food courts were often the best places to get a cheap, filling meal. Here's where we could find a pad thai for 10-20฿ (depending on whether egg is included) and plenty of small plates of interesting dishes.

We found all sorts of tasty nibbles at the market. First, we picked up a plate of grilled prawns, but they were dry and mealy tasting—like crawdads—so we didn't finish them (a rare event). Then we bought a platter of fried quail eggs - some plain, some in an omelet style. These were very delicious and cheap, and we bought a second batch of just the plain, fried style. I bought on impulse a short skewer of folded leaf triangles which turned out to be betel leaf (we learned this much later) stuffed with peanut and coconut. At one of the Wats, we bought a cheap plate of pad thai (10฿ without egg), and washed everything down with a coconut and jelly drink and then a beetroot and orange juice. For dessert, we grabbed Ancient Ice Cream, which is a rectangular block of ice cream on a stick, stuck through a bottomless cone-shaped paper cup. Mine dripped through, but was tasty anyhow. I had pandanus flavor (a green grass); Ryan had durian (a stinky fruit - actually, many hotels—especially later in our trip—prohibit bringing durian fruits into the hotel. Monkeys love this fruit.) Much later, I got a pork steam bun as a late night snack. We also found our 50฿ button-down shirts for the cooking class at a Wat shopping plaza.

Chiang Mai's Night Market

In contrast to the quality and diversity of the weekend markets is the Night Market. I believe I've mentioned it in other posts, but I don't think I've adequately portrayed its tackiness. First of all, the merchandise for sale is the same every fourth stall. There's an irritating English saying in Thailand, "same same," that means, "my merchandise is the same as his over there, so just buy from me and there's no need to shop for a cheaper price." Oddly, the phrase is also used to mean, "here's another, different, item that you might like to consider because it is similar to the one you're already looking at." This is annoying, because the alternative is usually not similar at all, despite the protests from the vendor that it is same same. Sometimes this leads "clever" merchants to add "but different" to the saying, thus showing that they understand the irony of the saying. However, there's also a good chance that anyone saying, "same same, but different" doesn’t get the irony, and is just saying it to get you to buy from them. (It took me a while to figure this all out. We didn't shop at the Night Market in Chiang Mai very much, and when I saw people wearing "Same Same" t-shirts, I thought at first that it was because of a local hotel called "Same Same." Although I didn't see "same same" used as much in Bangkok, the frequency of this phrase reaches a fever pitch in Phuket where there are many more tourists who "appreciate" the irony of the saying. Or else they just got suckered by a "same same" salesman.)

Despite the banality of the Night Market, we went there several times. One local attraction at the Night Market is the section of highly skilled artists working in pencil, pastels and oils. The popular choice is to provide a photograph of yourself or your family and have the artist reproduce it in the medium of your choice. Their illustration styles range from photo realism to slightly enhanced reality. The best creations are collages of several individual photographs to create a family portrait with everyone at their best.

Another Night Market activity that I participated in is the Fish Spa. It's called various names by different companies - Fish Doctor, Fish Massage - but they're all the same thing: you stick your feet into a fish tank and let tiny fish eat your skin. Ryan didn't want to try this form of mutualism so I was on my own while he shopped around the market. Here's what it feels like:

When I first arrived, I had to wash my feet. There was a small hose, a bar of soap and a coarse bristle brush, so I sat down and began scrubbing my feet. I had been walking around in my sandals all day and didn't think that fish would want dirty skin to eat. The owner of the Fish Spa hurried over and told me not to scrub so much. "My fish need to eat," she said.

I sat down on the bench and lowered my feet into the water. There was no one else at my tank, so the fish were probably bored or starving, because my feet were instantaneously covered with a thick robe of tiny fish, grasping and gnawing my feet with their gaping mouths. It was simultaneously ticklish and disturbing, like little kittens licking everywhere, or some sort of miniature octopus wielding hundreds of vacuum cleaners. After a while, I became more used to the feeling and even dipped my hands in from time to time. Even with all the flesh to nibble on already, there were always more fish eager to check out the new buffets whenever I inserted a hand or let my legs go in deeper. I was always afraid that I'd pull fish out with me if I removed a hand too quickly, so I made a habit of shaking my fingers a bit before pulling my hand up form the tank. Since I was sitting in a glass room facing the sidewalk, there were many tourists coming up and taking photos or videos of my feet and their new inhabitants. Sometimes I waved or smiled at them and encouraged them to come give it a try (but I was never successful).

Fish Spa

It tickles!

I'd paid for only a half hour session, but when my time ran up there was no one else in the spa, so the girls who were managing the place approached me nervously and asked me if I would like to stay there until some more customers came. I had no where to be, so I agreed (it was a free extension of time). I ended up staying another half hour - so an hour total - until finally I decided I'd had enough, though no more customers had arrived. During that second half hour, Ryan had come back and the two of us talked to the girls running the Fish Spa. I practiced my Thai, they practiced English. They had a two-way dictionary with them so we were looking up words back and forth in our attempts to communicate. Eventually I decided that I'd made the fish fat enough already and we left.

3 Kings Plaza

This was one of the temporary food markets only for Loy Krathong. I call it the "3 Kings Plaza" because it's where the statue of the 3 Thai Kings is - at the spiritual center of Chiang Mai, just outside the Cultural Museum we visited on the first day. We returned on the second night of Loy Krathong because we'd seen a preview of the decorations that were going up (the sea of colorful paper lanterns). It turned out that the plaza had been turned into a massive food court with many vendors lined up, most of which were offering regional specialties from the North that I hadn't seen yet.


Fried Spinach Cake

My favorite was a fried spinach cake for 20฿ (also available steamed) that looked like it was held together by a lot of rice gluten (like mochi). It came drizzled with sweet and spicy sauces. Ryan liked the trail mix we got containing deep fried nuts, basil leaf, lime leaf and chilies (20฿). We found an unusual cheese (I think it was), also offered fried or raw. We liked the cheese so much that we bought a second order right away. I haven't seen that cheese anywhere else in Thailand, so I don't have any idea what it was.

Thai "Corn Dog"

Ryan got a silly "corn dog" that was really just a piece of hotdog wrapped in three gargantuan layers of pancake, stuck on a stick. I was intrigued by a rack of bamboo segments roasting over a grill. I learned that they were stuffed with sticky rice, but was too full to try them. We did get to have some of these in our next destination, so I'll leave the description of their yumminess for later.

For dessert, we had a raisin rotee (or roti) - it's like a pancake, but rolled from a ball of dough rather than poured as batter, then fried and drizzled with sweetened condensed milk and sugar. The most popular topping is banana, but I liked the raisin variety. Rotee are also offered with savory flavors like shredded pork or curry.

Eating Fried Bugs

On another night during the festival, we bought a variety pack (20฿) of fried insects from one of the street vendors. Since there were several insect sellers mixed in the hundreds of festival food carts, we figured it was a legit snack (though I don't think I've ever seen anyone else actually snacking on them). Ryan was bolder than I was (really, I just didn't like the taste that much) and sampled the entire menu. I stuck to a few of the basic bugs.

• Silk worm (a fat grub)
  
• Bamboo worm (a thin grub)
  
• Grasshopper (big and leggy)
  
• Cricket (smaller than the grasshopper)
  
• Whirligig beetle (big and black)
  
• Cicada (with wings)

Insect Vendor

Some of the insects were crunchy, others were chewier. I didn't particularly like any of the flavors - there's a bitter taste to them that I find hard to cover up. Maybe they'd be good dipped in chocolate like Ryan suggested, but then I figure, why not just eat the chocolate by itself? (Assuming it's good chocolate, which would be necessary, I'd say.) The least offensive ones that I tried were the grubs and the smaller beetles.