Night bizarre
(Detail of cowhide cut-out from the night bazaar: Chiang Mai, Thailand)
Our hotel is within a few minutes of a night bazaar; they are open until midnight but they also appear to be trading from the early morning as well. They sell anything from silk accessories to dried squid and all the trinketry in between. We both came away with new sunglasses, Pete with a head massager and me with some postcard stamps (they’re on their way!) and this cut cowhide character. Now, I have a penchant for nasty souvenirs, especially of the religious variety, but I rarely invest in the slightly higher end ethnic goods. This is due to a number of factors including a blend of taste, price, child labour issues, buying clichés and many more. This however transcended all misgivings I usually have, it was one of those moments when one finds an object of real, dynamic beauty and it cannot be ignored.
We had already passed the stall once in our rambling sashay around the bazaar, and this had caught my eye, but the flip flopped jostling of other tourists swept us onward. As the stallholders were wrapping up their wares, we trailed along the same alleyway and I stopped to touch it, hanging above my head. In the glare of a bare bulb, he appeared to be on fire, but these were the reddish strands of hair sprouting from behind him. Pete told me that the character here is Garuda, a bird like mythical character and beneath him, his enemy, Naga, snake of legend. I will attempt to photograph them better later, instead of holding them up to a hotel lampshade.
The man claiming to be the artist sprouted from behind me, immediately crunching the beauteous carving into a ball, “never break, can roll it like this. I made this one – takes three days. You keep it, ten, twenty years in your house.” We bartered with each other by the usual method: a calculator. He began by tapping in the figure 1350 and I retorted with a cheeky 850. We moved along with his 1200, my 950, then his 1100, leaving a unanimous final score of 1000 baht (just shy of £19) and even better, he and I were both very satisfied with the transaction. Bartering can go wrong, but I’m extra pleased if there are smiles on both sides, that means everybody wins; I believe I got a bargain and he believes he got a fair price. I was grinning all the way back to the hotel.
[...] a new and exciting experience unlike anything I’ve ever seen. The shadow puppets reminded me of a leather cut I found in Thailand. I might have succumbed to a puppet to bring home, but Ying was stringent on shopping time in Bali. [...]