WalMart's got nothing on the variety and super-low prices of our Sunday Market

If you need it, they have it at the Sunday market. Mats, bags, sticky rice holders, baskets. Soaps, detergents, blankets, pillows, sheets. Brooms, mops, twigs (i still don't know how the sellers find people to buy twigs.)


Shirts -used and new- , uniforms, fashionable hats, bracelets, amulets and muumuus.Footballs, whicker takra balls, shuttlecocks. Fermented fish sauce, meat on a stick, fresh rambutans, pineapples, coconuts and mangosteens. Karaoke CDS, pirated movies, the hottest new Mor Lam or Big Ass.

Plastic junk, metal junk, junk food, knock-offs, rip-offs. And the traffic is chaos: bikes, motorbikes, tuk-tuks, songthaews, tractors, trucks, semis, taxis.

A example of the large range of foods I consider "meat on a stick", these delicious "meatballs" skewered three at a time are some of my favorite. More specifically, the green and yellow ones that don't appear to be exciting at all. For 10 Baht (a quarter) you can get a stick and if you buy two, that's good enough to fill you. In Thai we call it "luuk jin" but that roughly translates to "Chinese pieces" or "Chinese balls" so Dimsum works just as well.


I'm not a big buyer at the market but I love to walk around and see what the stalls have to offer. Just a small glimpse of the strange items available every Sunday morning, here are some from this last weekend:

This T-shirts is a great example of the endemic English problems in Thailand. The mistake with the "R" is only the addition of a single line but with it, it just doesn't translate. Though we can figure it out "COMRANY" just isn't a word. There are hundreds of mistakes like this, and most are even worse showing sentences without verbs (happy cloud sky rainbow wonderful!) or incorrect grammar that confuses the entire meaning (I miss you not forget when I smile.)

This shirt is a plain example of another type of entertaining shirts, the ones that despite their understandable English, are still confusing. "I saw Mrs. Body-X kissing Mrs. Body-X." Who Mrs. Body-X is I don't know and I'm pretty sure I'll never have the pleasure of finding out. Further, this T-shirt appears to be a knock on "I saw mommy kissing Santa Claus." What that has to do with the mysterious Mrs. Body-X I don't know...

A DVD in the "CENTURY" series, the Donald Rumsfeld episode looks good, promising excitement with a random building exploding as background to Rummy's furrowed brow and pointing finger. I didn't shuck out the 99 Baht to become the lucky owner of this documentary but I'd say its cover is a fair image of foreign opinion on our leaders.