First Weekend Market Experience!

This morning I woke up and was excited to experience the apparently-famous Nonthaburi market here in Thailand. Sarah and I have both been early risers the past couple days, so we headed out to the market and were excited to see an abundance of produce. Vegetables are something that most rice and noodle dishes here are lacking, so we wanted to purchase some good vegetables and obviously some delicious tropical fruit! We imagined the market to be a massive produce market with a ton of fruits and vegetables and filled with colourful textiles. This is not at all what we encountered.

Something that is quite frequent here is the presence of strong smells and nauseating odours. The market was like the vacation spot for all of these nauseating odours to congregate and have a good ol’ time. I am not usually someone who reacts strongly to smell or has a weak stomach or gag reflex, but there were moments at the market that I thought I might be sick. The market was a completely different experience than I imagined, and one that is going to take some getting used to.

As Sarah and I entered the market pig heads greeted us, and this was something that seemed like a Kodak moment. Sarah took out her camera to photograph the pig heads, because this seemed out of the ordinary. Little did we know what was coming. We were quickly greeted by massive slabs of meat swarming with bugs on tables all around us. There was nowhere to go but forward, and everything surrounding you was a raw slab of something. Each table was dripping with meat juice and the floors were covered in unidentified liquids. This was something I quickly needed to get used to, as this is far from what I have ever experienced in Canada. I tried to wipe the overwhelmed and possibly unintentional judgmental look off my face and push forward. I was assuming that there would be a produce section and I just needed to get there. As I walked through the meat section, however, I was quickly greeted with my worst nightmare. A bucket of snakes. If you know me at all, you know this is basically a five-alarm-emergency. I backed up quickly, not really knowing what I would back into as I did this. I was actually proud of my reaction. I did not scream, but did cry. This is a big step. It is probably socially unacceptable to scream in a market here, as I have been warned that public displays of emotion are not frequent here. Crying is probably also weird, but it was better than screaming and crying, right?

I am now officially terrified. I want to get out of the market, but we backtracked and found another corridor with vendors that we could get away from the snakes. Sarah is the most wonderful person, and we derived a system where she would walk ahead and signal if there were snakes or snake-like-objects up ahead. Unfortunately this was an occurrence that was more frequent than I would have  liked, and this forged the path for us. We did not make our own path, but instead were directed by the snakes in the market. Just thinking about the fact that snakes were directing us completely freaks me out, but at least I am far removed from that now.

There were a lot of eye opening experiences during our morning outing to the market, and this has made me so very aware of how much I need to become accustom to the culture here. In other words, I need to become sabai sabai as they say here. As I walking down one aisle of the market, there was a stream of blood coming off the table, and I had to yell at Sarah so she did not step in it. This is something that is acceptable here, but it would be far from that in North America. As well, there were cats everywhere. I have to admit that some of them were actually really cute, but the fact that they were hanging out with the food was another thing to adjust to. A lot of things here, such as a trip to the morning market, are completely overwhelming. Not knowing the language, and trying to communicate is a difficult task and requires a sufficient amount of energy. We have been trying to ease our way into things and take time to process what we are learning, but it is still exhausting. I pray (and would also love if you could pray!) that God grants us strength and patience as we get used to this new culture.

As I was saying, it is very difficult to communicate in a culture where barely anyone speaks English and you don’t know the language, and it is a tough language to learn. After we finally made our way out of the maze of the market, we looked around to be greeted by a completely unfamiliar street. Or at least we thought it was. We weren’t even 100% sure it was the wrong street, but we thought it didn’t look too familiar. A problem right now is that everything looks similar. There were not significant landmarks that we could pick out, and each street is filled with store fronts with Thai signs and street vendors that look practically identical. We attempted to find our way, and went down one street. Every person kept pointing us the same direction, but as we got closer and realized this was an alleyway that we were being led down, we got a little frightened. Mom (and Sarah’s mom!), if you are reading this I know you are probably terrified. We knew not to go down there, and used our better judgment to get back to the main street where there were at least a lot of people around.  We asked a lot of people (with the help of our handy Thai phrasebook) how to get back to the road we needed to be on. We imagine we were saying the road name completely wrong, as no one had any idea what we were saying. People kept speaking to us completely in Thai, and they had expressions on their face that were universal. I knew that they desperately wanted to help us, and compassion oozed out of their faces, but we just had no idea how to communicate. We tried everything we could think of, but were having a rough time. We decided we would walk down the main road and try to find our road (or a sign that we could understand). As we walked, we came to a woman who was washing her vehicle. We asked if she spoke English, and she spoke a very limited amount. This was a lot nicer than people who spoke nothing at all, however. We decided to take a taxi, and we hoped that we had been able to communicate where we needed to go to her. It is a little unnerving to get into a taxi when you are not entirely sure that they know where they are taking you. We told the man in the taxi where we were going and he nodded his head rapidly. This doesn’t mean a lot to me now though, because I have come to notice that often when people to do not understand what you are saying they will shake their head yes. Also, something completely strange to me is when someone says “no” and rapidly nods. I have left several conversations after asking for something being completely confused and not knowing whether I am leaving because they don’t have it or can’t do it, or just because I am confused. One time when asking for food, he said no and nodded, and then made me the food. Another time, when asking for coffee a man said no and was explaining something to me in Thai (great!) and then I walked away eventually because I got the notion he was saying no.

We did make it back to the school (cost: $1.00…everything here is really cheap!!) and I am so thankful that God is watching over us as we step out and adventure here. We are taking small steps and adjusting slowly, and it is definitely something to get used to. I am loving it so far and really happy that we have some time to settle in before orientation and teaching begins.