Tuu took us to a night market that you can actually see from our hotel. At first, we weren’t necessarily enthused – after all, we’d seen two different ones in Bangkok and how different could this be.
Wow. What a mistake missing this would have been!
This is inside a couple of old warehouses, as well as on sidewalks all around it. Even with a lot of the stores closed because it’s not “high season,” there was still plenty to see. It’s not all T-shirts, watches and knockoff handbags, either (sorry Jordan and Benita, those days are over).
Instead, there was tons and tons of local art. Real art, not stuff that looks like it came out of Vacation Bible School, but true craftsmen and women working on unique and intricate items that you can tell require both creativity and skill to put together.
There were incredible graphic artists who were taking photographs of individuals and rendering them in charcoal.
"Hill people" were doing traditional woven and textile crafts in front of you, having brought the wares they made during the rainy season in to sell. “Hill People” are the indigenous people who live in the mountains that divide Burma, Laos and Thailand. Until fairly recently, they kept much to themselves and did not interact with the people in the cities, staying with their traditional way of life. Lately, though, they’ve started venturing into the cities out of economic necessity. Their weaving and needlework is amazing.
One man was making raised metal panels with dragons and other scenes on them by taking a flat piece of tin and hitting it with a hammer to stretch and mold the metal the way he wanted it to go. We later realized that these same panels are the inserts across the bottom of the front desk in our hotel.
There were dozens of stalls with carvings in a variety of media. It was pretty spectacular, and we have to go back again. We were just too tired to see it all that night.
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