Day 093 of Our Winter: We remembered the Chatuchak Weekend Market from our last time in Bangkok a couple of years ago. The market isn't that far away but we didn't feel like taking the Airport Link Rail one more stop and then connecting to the SkyTrain-type BTS. We had to wait for about 20 minutes for a Grab rideshare to get to the hotel lobby.
A car made by BYD arrived to pick us up to get us to the market in around 25 minutes. It was my first ride in one of the Chinese electric vehicles. Whereas the US automakers are throwing in their collective towel on the future of automobiles, this company is going to only be held back by tariffs and reminiscing about when the US had an automotive sector. BYD will supplying EVs to the rest of the world. It's a shame that the United States no longer has a desire to compete or engage with the rest of the world unless through military misadventures. I grew up in the shadow of the space race and when the future held promises and science wasn't a swear word.
Here were some thoughts on the Market: "Sitting here on the edge of the world's largest open-air maze, ostensibly catching a 'natural breeze' that is really just the filtered exhaust of the Mo Chit transit corridor. Around me, 35 acres and some 15,000 stalls hum with the frantic energy of 200,000 people—half of whom seem to be like Jay's sisters—convinced they’ve discovered a fiscal miracle in a 100-Baht pashmina. It is a grand, chaotic monument to the 'grazing' instinct. While the retail infantry vanishes into the 27 sections of the maze, I am content to audit the logistics from the perimeter, smiling through the smog and realizing that while it truly 'takes all kinds' to make a world, most of them appear to be currently blocked in Soi 3."
