floating with the market

i remember when i was a kid, at home we had a book called Circling the Globe and i would constantly browse through it as well as other reference books. one of the countries that i always took a longer time looking at is Thailand, and its floating market would always be featured in entries for the country. it was and still is my dream to go to the places i was so fascinated by on pictures back then. while for the many their childhood fantasy might have been to go to Disneyland, just one of mine was going to The Floating Market. i was such a geek. hehe.

dream come true... yay!

there are actually more than one floating markets in Thailand. Damnoen Saduak is the most famous and most beautiful of them all, so i decided to go there-- alone with a little guidance from my friend. i took the van that leaves Victory Monument and to my surprise, i was the only non-Thai among the passengers and i thought that wasn't the day tourists would want to go there. but when i arrived, they were all there and some were just getting off their tour buses. i really did a DIY trip for this one, didn't i?

some youngsters on a field trip

it's amazing how clean the river was despite the fact that all sorts of stuff were sold there. they even cooked barbecues(chicken, banana, etc.) while on the boat. it's impressive how tidy the Thais are. and i wouldn't say just old but really, senior citizen women were the boat paddlers. for someone coming from a place where  some, if not most, of the senior citizens are annoyingly abusive of their privileges of special treatment, it was like i'm seeing an unbelievably real superpower. again, it's another thing that amazed me because they were not using their age as an excuse to do something people younger than them are more likely to do.

the market could be as busy as a mall. see below, i had never thought traffic on water could get as heavy as this.

bumper to bumper

along the waters, there were also stores which stood on the river itself. every store looked like a stage because you cannot get inside them. you just stay on your boat and watch them as you pass by them. if you have to buy anything, you just have to point at it and the vendor will get it for you.

this visit made me absolutely appreciate Thailand's faithfulness to their culture. they don't just preserve it just for the sake of tourism or good impression, but it's actually a part of their daily economic activities, plus you cannot see any traces of discontent on them with what they do. they live it and they love it.