The Magic of Markets
For me, entering public markets in Europe and Asia has been like stepping through a wardrobe into strange new worlds.
For the audio version of this article, read by the author, go here.
I think my love of travel started when I read the C. S. Lewis book The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe as a kid — especially that moment when Lucy stepped out of the magic wardrobe and into the wondrous land of Narnia.
From that moment on, I wanted to travel to wondrous places myself — to be a stranger in strange lands.
And in the years since I have.
Sometimes I even travel there by stepping through my own kind of magic wardrobe.
Brent and I lived in Seattle before becoming nomads, but when I first visited the city, the thing I loved most was the Pike Place Market — the city’s famous public market.
It wasn’t Narnia, but I’d never seen anything like it growing up in Denver, Colorado. The flower stalls! The fishmongers tossing fish! The bustle of it all.
Years later, when Brent and I visited Barcelona, Spain, I felt the same about La Boqueria, the famous public market on La Rambla. The croquettes! The patatas bravas! And once again, the bustle.
Those markets were only the beginning of my love affair with public markets.
In 2019, Brent and I lived in Hội An, Vietnam, for three months. An outdoor market called Bà Lê Market was a ten-minute bike ride from our homestay. I’d been told this was the place to buy fruit and vegetables.
Stepping into one of the market’s narrow walkways on a very hot morning, I felt like I’d entered another world — like Lucy stepping through that magic wardrobe.
The bright sunlight was replaced by mysterious shadows — and people, all packed tightly together.
Was that a bucket full of snakes?
I leaned closer. Nope, those were eels — I’d just never seen one before.
Everywhere I turned in Bà Lê, I saw something I’d never seen.
Women in straw hats crouched next to plastic tubs filled with flopping shrimp.
Shrimp can flop? I thought.
I walked through the market, passing piles of fruit. The bananas were surprisingly small, each one only a couple of inches long. But what were strange pink fruits with spiky green protrusions? And the purple ones?
A man walked by. Despite the sweltering heat, he wore trousers and a long-sleeved shirt. He held a cage stuffed with plump white geese.
That can’t be good news for the geese, I thought.
All around me, people chattered and laughed and haggled with fierce concentration, all of it in a language I didn’t understand. Once a deal was struck, handfuls of colorful currency were exchanged for fruit and meat.
As I wandered around the market, I smelled strange scents.
A lemon-scented soup simmering in a huge pot over an open flame.
The surprisingly pungent tang from some leafy green vegetable.
The powerful sweetness of ripe mangoes.
Not every sight was magical. In a different section, I saw piles of raw meat, a tub of gutted fish, stacks of ribcages from some large animal — and a single hogshead sitting forlornly on a table.
If I really had entered Narnia, I could only hope these hadn’t been talking animals.
With all this raw meat and seafood, the smell was rank and ripe.
There were no other tourists, and at 6’1’, I towered over the Vietnamese. Then there’s my pasty complexion and the fact that I sweat a lot in humid climates.
I stuck out like a tall, pale, sweaty thumb.
I was a stranger in a very strange land. But I didn’t mind at all.
Quite the opposite. I loved where my magic wardrobe — this market — had taken me.
Bà Lê was the first truly foreign market I visited in my seven years as a nomad. There have since been a lot more.
Some have been permanent markets like Bà Lê, open every day, while others are weekly or bi-weekly.
Unlike La Boqueria in Barcelona or Pike Place Market in Seattle, these aren’t tourist markets. They tend to be simpler, often grittier places. They’re also where I do our actual, day-to-day shopping.
I’ve shopped for smoked sausage, roasted chicken, and homemade cheese at the Green Market in Split, Croatia.
I’ve browsed fresh red peppers and raspberries at Cibin Market in Sibiu, Romania.
I’ve bought flowers at Bangkok’s Pak Khlong Talat Flower Market.
And most recently, I’ve purchased tomatoes, cherries, watermelon, peppers, corn, and much more at the Tuesday Market in Fethiye, Turkey.
I’ve loved all these markets for different reasons.
But there’s one market I’ve loved the most: Bangkok’s Khlong Toei Market.
I’d been warned ahead of time that Khlong Toei can be intimidating. It’s the largest public market in Bangkok, which is itself an overwhelming city.
Khlong Toei is massive, with fifteen hundred stalls spread over 28 acres (around 113,000 square meters) right in the heart of central Bangkok.
It’s also a critical link in Bangkok’s food supply chain feeding a surprisingly large portion of the city. Thousands of vendors sell to tens of thousands of shoppers who crowd into its narrow walkways each day.
It’s packed, chaotic, and not for the faint of heart.
Part of what makes Khlong Toei a challenge for some Westerners is that it sells freshly butchered pork and beef, and poultry and seafood that is brought to the market alive and killed as needed.
Khlong Toei is a “wet” market because the ground is literally always wet — from the ice used to keep the meat and seafood fresh, and also because everything is frequently hosed down to wash away the blood and leftovers that result from the animals being butchered.
My tuk-tuk dropped me off at 7 AM, and I was steeled to enter the land of Khlong Toei.
I started with the fruit and vegetable section, which seemed like a good way to get my feet wet, so to speak.
I stepped inside, under the awnings, tarps, and umbrellas that give shelter from the sun. Despite the early hour, the sun was already scorching, and the humidity was almost as bad.
I recognized the bananas, apples, and watermelons. And I knew from Vietnam that the pink, hairy fruit was called rambutan. I also recognized the durian — green, spiky fruits that the Thai love but that smell awful when cut open.
But much wasn’t familiar. I saw strangely green oranges and a bell-shaped red fruit. And what was the cherry-sized thing in the small red shell?
I spotted pineapple and strawberries and dragon fruit and passion fruit and jackfruit and coconuts — all of it creating a kaleidoscope of color.
It smelled amazing.
The vegetables were a bit less colorful, but many were no less exotic to my eyes. Plus, there was the sheer quantity! So many greens piled high on table after table. I happily wandered among stacks of shiny cucumbers, piles of red tomatoes, bundles of leafy morning glory, Chinese broccoli, and fist-sized bok choy.
Everywhere customers perused the produce, poking and smelling it.
I examined bundles of thick-stemmed lemongrass, piles of loose bright green kaffir lime leaves, and mounds of reddish, knobby galangal root. All would soon be used in the Thai dishes that Brent and I knew had such wonderfully complex flavors.
Next came the spices: tables with plastic bags of sweet-smelling cloves, cardamom, and nutmeg. I also saw bags of different curries — cumin, coriander, turmeric, black pepper, and chili all ground together into different combinations.
With the day growing hotter, I pushed on into the section that most gives Khlong Toei its gritty reputation: the meat, poultry, and seafood areas.
The smell hit me first: the metallic tang of blood and the earthy smell of chickens, geese, and ducks in cages.
Sure enough, the concrete ground was slick with melted ice and the water from the cleaners endlessly washing everything down with their hoses.
On one table sat strangely orange-colored chickens. They had only been recently slaughtered, the heads and feet were still attached. A man methodically gutted them.
Other tables were laden with more glistening pieces of dismembered chickens: breasts, thighs, wings, dark-red hearts, feet, and more.
Nearby, I spotted living chickens in wire cages with butchered ones stored right on top. I hoped the live chickens below had no sense of their impending fate.
It was gruesome, but I’m not a vegetarian, and I think it’s good to come face-to-face with the stark reality of what it means to eat meat.
Next came the butchered livestock: ground-up pork and beef next to piles of intestines, and more hearts, lungs, and livers. Huge hunks of beef sat next to smaller cuts of pork, as well as ribs, ears, hoofs, and more.
I passed into the seafood section, and once again, the smell was especially pungent. I wondered how many decades’ worth of fish guts and blood had soaked into the concrete beneath my feet. No matter how vigorously cleaners washed everything down, it would never quell the stench.
I spied plastic tubs and metal bins filled with living seafood: bright red crabs, squids and octopi, and mounds of shellfish. There were shrimp, but there was enough water that at least they weren’t flopping this time.
Some fish were already butchered. Gutted barramundi, tilapia, and snakehead fish rested on piles of ice, often with their bloody heads next to them.
But then a fishmonger plucked a still-living black-striped fish from a tank of water, whacked it on the head once, and then proceeded to gut and scale it — while it still appeared to be alive.
Feeding an entire city isn’t a pretty business.
Before Khlong Toei, foreign public markets had made me feel like Lucy entering Narnia through that wardrobe. Now I felt more like Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole into Wonderland.
Or maybe someplace even more unsettling. Was it time for me to finally give up meat?
I didn’t regret coming, not at all. I still loved being out of my element, being the tall, sweaty Westerner. Knowing I wasn’t in Kansas anymore.
But it wasn’t Oz either. This was a grim, disturbing land of darker adventures.
Much of what I loved about Khlong Toei was the people: the chaotic energy of the workers — the butchers and fishmongers, the porters, the merchants and cleaners. And also the locals and restaurateurs bartering for what they would soon cook for lunch and dinner.
People knew each other here. This wasn’t only a market; it was a village of sorts — but in a hidden land you had to find your way into.
I walked on until I suddenly found myself surrounded by nicer odors — delicious even: frying garlic and meat, and tangy curries.
I’d reached the famous food stalls within Khlong Toei market.
Everywhere I turned, something simmered, bubbled, or sizzled. I saw huge pots of coconut milk turned bright orange by curry.
Most of the cooks were women who didn’t seem to sweat, not even in the flames of their propane tanks or the heat of the morning sun.
Back in the meat and poultry section, I’d lost my appetite. Now it returned with a vengeance.
I ordered a red curry chicken over rice — so much for becoming vegetarian. I ate it sitting at a child-sized table with red plastic chairs.
It was delicious. The chili peppers gave it heat, and the coconut milk a sweet creaminess. I savored the tang of the lemongrass and galangal.
Finished eating, I knew there was more of Khlong Toei to see: the dry goods and housewares, and the floral, bakery, and clothing sections.
But it was time to leave. Like Lucy at the end of her Narnian adventure, I now had to go back to the “real” world.
My stint as a stranger in a strange land was over — but only for the time being.
Because I still had my magic wardrobe: the entrance to public markets all over the world, always ready to carry me to some wonderful new land.
Michael Jensen is a novelist and editor. For more about Michael, visit him at MichaelJensen.com.
I don't know if I love your writing or the images more... I feel like I'm with you every step of the way. Thank you for never disappointing!
Such evocative writing, it felt like we were walking along with you and seeing everything