This morning Debbie was too sick to do much of anything, so I took the city’s slick new Skyway train to the legendary Saturday Market. It was a hot morning, but the trains are clean and air conditioned and every five feet or so there’s a flats-creen TV monitor showing advertisements for everything from Nestle’s sterilized nonfat milk (cows undergoing weight reduction treatments) to obscure boxed Thai drinks being hawked by midgets. I changed trains at Siam station and rode about fifteen minutes to the end station at Mo Chit with a proliferating crowd of eager western women and their grim-faced husbands. The market lies on perhaps twenty city blocks entirely covered with little roofed-over stalls selling everything imaginable. The heat and humidity made for a choking atmosphere, especially amid wafts iof an odor I haven’t been able to trace to its source, but if it turns out to be a pile of decayed shrimp marinating in urine I will not be surprised. It’s different from India’s decidedly excretal but also smoky and heavily spiced fetor; this is fishier, more acrid, and more mysterious. Especially when you pass a food stall and there’s a pile of something bubbling in a steam tray that is as utterly unrecognizable as, say, pickled genitals from outer space. (Tonight at a Japanese restaurant they offered up a nice bowl of “preserved cuttle fish guts,” or so the menu said.)
But the market is, as advertised, one of the wonders of the shopping world. I squeezed my way past hundreds of stalls selling every conceivable beautiful Eastern thing (and a lot of Western knock-offs): carvings, statuary, old Chinese trunks and bedsteads and cabinets, Buddhist tonkas and mandalas, brassware, hand-woven silk, heaps of blue and white china, forests of antique lamps and freestanding electric fans from the forties, rows of bronze bells and gongs, old photographs and postcards, coins, used books and magazines, beads, shells, fossils, butterfly boxes, scorpions encapsulated in glass, wicker baskets, jewelry, fetishes, puppets, chimes, and on and on.
I did not buy a thing. I have this theory that you only buy trash the first month you live anywhere new, and that by the host country’s standard you always get taken. The worst stuff I bought in India forty years ago I purchased during the first weeks, when I should have saved my money for the better stuff I came upon and learned to recognize and appreciate later on.

I was assisted in sticking to my resolve by the sheer overwhelming volume of stuff for sale: selecting something to purchase would have been like trying to pluck a diamond from an avalanche. The damp, airless heat had something to do with my impecuniousness as well.
Unlike Indian vendors, the proprietors of the Saturday Market stalls don’t hawk their wares, and I was able to enter and exit various stalls without being importuned by anyone. In fact, for all their hustle and bustle, it seemed to me that Thais seem somehow to have retained their civility. Some of the girls who take our orders at bakeries and stores are so sweet that Debbie says they make tears come to her eyes. Their greetings with hands clasped are even more appealing than the Indian nemaste.