Pingles was teasing me on the flight "it's soooooo hot in Bangkok, it's ridiculous." I imagined taking a few tentative steps outside our hotel and melting into a small pale puddle on the sidewalk. I considered the various ways I would die from the heat. "Just wait til you get to the market - the covered one without AC and thousands of people pressing all around you." She was taking great pleasure in this. Perhaps the gods were listening because a strange thing happened. At Jatujak market, the one feeling the heat was Pingles, not I. I felt like making an offering at one of the many small Buddhist temples that dot the city.
We had a delicious lunch just inside market's edge which I wrote up here. Then we were off and shopping. Jatujak market is a maze of tight alleys housing thousands of small stalls selling all manner of goods: clothes, food, jewelry, books, etc. Pingles practiced her shaky bargaining skills, which after a while, boiled down to the following rules: pay full price if you really like something and cannot get the price lowered or haggle for while and don't buy. The vendors were much better negotiators than us, but in reality, you're only haggling over a dollar or two.
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