Day and Night

On the way home last night, I stopped on Sukhumvit Road and bought a "som tam" from a street vendor. Som tam is a classic Thai dish -- it's a salad of green (meaning, unripe) papaya, with fish paste, tomatoes, and peanuts in a chili/lime dressing. The som tam maker puts all of the ingredients in a wooden bowl, pounds them around for a bit with a wooden mallet, mixes everything together, and then pours it into a bowl for you. There are some variations - with black crab or without, more chilies or less, peanuts or no peanuts -- but the basic ingredients are the same every time. And it is really, really tasty -- one of my favorite dishes here. I walk down that stretch of Sukhumvit every week night on my way back from work ("glap baan" - means "go back home" in Thai) but last night was the first time I noticed this vendor selling som tam. It made me realize just how much the street changes each day.

On my way to work each morning, there is a woman selling food at the corner of Sukhumvit Soi 10 (the side street I live on). Behind her, the gold jewelry store hasn’t opened yet but will later. On the way home, the woman is gone and the owners of the jewelry shop often have a table set up on the sidewalk and the family is outside eating dinner.

Past the jewelry store, the sidewalks are empty.

But on the way home, vendors have set up their tables and tarps and are selling t-shirts.

I used to wonder how they could put up with the traffic noise hour after hour until I noticed that quite a few of them are deaf. I see them using sign language to communicate with each other. (Is there a Thai sign language? And how would they communicate the tones?)

Further down Sukhumvit, I go up and over through the Asoke Skytrain stop to get to the other side of Sukhumvit. This fellow is always at the base of the stairs, selling pomelos – sort of a cross between an orange and a grapefruit.

In the morning, this is what the sidewalk looks like.

But on the way home, the pomelo guy is gone and has been replaced by these guys, who have set up their tables and tarps and are selling shorts, belts, and t-shirts.

None of these businesses seem “official” in the sense of having an address or a name but the same people are in the same place selling the same items every day. And they all have electricity – lights are on and there are TVs playing underneath the tables so the owners have something to watch when business is slow.