Saturday Night. pt 2.
Posted in Alex's Blog on September 8, 2010
Julien had been in Chiang Mai for 4 weeks, he was leaving in two days and had decided that tonight was as good as any to do the “big shop” an event key to any trip to a country filled with cheap merchandise. The store we were looking for was the Twins shop located at the center of the Night Bizarre and hidden within a food court. Though I’d been there before it was on one of my first nights in Chiang Mai and under the pleasant sedation of a few cold ones. For those of you that haven’t been to a market in Asia the only way I can describe it is to take all the mania of a soccer match, add the output of several sweatshops, subtract any legitimate products, multiply it by the square of every handmade bag, notebook, painting, sarong, bangle, handicraft, and trinket you have ever seen, don’t forget to carry the broad smiles and special discounts for “you and you only”, and finally multiply it by as many pasty white people in sleeveless t-shirts or loose cotton pants that you can think off, put the product off all this into one street and there you have it “The Saturday Night Bizarre”. You can buy just about anything granted you don’t care that its a blatant knockoff. The vendors flash you the price on a calculator so that your never really aware of what anyone is actually paying for the knockoffs, just below half is always a good place to start, lets them know you mean real business. Nonetheless we swam through the crowd and eventually found our way to the twins store. Julien was like a kid in a candy store……. a really fat kid. He proceeded to buy an aintense amount of gear that included two pairs of 16oz gloves, one pair of bag gloves, one focus mitt “shit better make it two” two focus mitts, a set of thai pads, and some head gear to name but a few, he’d already bought a large boxing bag earlier in his stay which was good since we had to carry all that leather pack on one bike, we figured it would be easiest to just wear as much of it as possible at least that way in the likely event that we crashed we’d be well protected. Though that was a convincing argument we decided maybe it was not such a bright idea, and instead precariously balanced all the bags on either side of the bike while we zipped back to the apartments to drop it off. Unloaded and ready to rock n roll we set back off in the exact same direction we had come from for it was off to Loi Khro stadium to see James first fight………
