Or Tor Kor is where rich people in Bangkok shop. It’s clean and bright and expensive. There’s a Royal Projects shop (government initiative for rural areas that might otherwise grow drugs) with “pesticide controlled” fruits and vegetables…and air conditioning.
There’s a whole prepared foods section with soups made from pork bones and star anise and green curries and pad thai. There’s a dessert store or five that sells gorgeous rice flour and cocont and tapioca sweets and naturally coloured sticky rice that you douse in more coconut mlk and sweet mixes of tapioca pearls and taro and crispy cornflakes.
There are a banana leaf-wrapped triangles of everything from tapioca and filled with sweet or savoury bean or peanut paste to chicken and pork and duck.
There are vats of prepared curries in ever colour full of every meat, fish, vegetable and lots of tamarind.
And there are giant papayas, rose apples, $16 pomelos, $3 mangoes, and plastic bags of premade green papaya salad for 25 cents. Hunt for your bargains. When the man sells you a pennywort juice with a sign that says 20 baht and asks for 70, don’t assume he’s ripping you off. In fact, he just doesn’t know the word for 20 and thinks it’s 70. My Thai is worse than his English, to be fair.
It’s a tourist-friendly market. Locals shop here, especially early in the morning, but many of the vendors actually speak a little English (many don’t. And they will laugh at you in Thai when you don’t understand what they’re saying. They do rip you off. And generally, you have to be alright with that).
Some will offer you tissues, like the woman from the tea shop by the bench where I sat to eat my tom yam soup from a plastic bag—a perilous task. Was she trying to guilt me into buying something from her stall after? I didn’t. She didn’t seem upset. I hadn’t asked for the tissues.
Exit 3 was closed. I took the BTS skytrain to Mo Chit, which is fine for getting to Chatuchak Weekend Market, but to get to Or Tor Kor (pronounced “Ah taw kaw”) you have to cross two giant lanes of traffic after a 1.2km walk. So what you do instead is walk along the edge of the weekend market until you come to the Kamphaeng Phet (not the Chatuchak MRT), descend into the subway system but instead of going to the trains, just take exit 3.
But from the first entrance into the MRT, there was no exit 3. Why does nothing work as it’s supposed to in Thailand? I did everything right. Every time you try to get there, whether it’s by taxi, boat, bus, or train, you think you’ve made it and then Thailand pulls the rug out from under you, and you’re left crying in frustration!
The security guard just smiled and said I had to go back up. His English wasn’t good enough to offer me more precise directions to Or Tor Kor. And my Thai wasn’t good enough either. Really, it was my fault as the visitor. Why should he have to speak English?
But I figured there might be another MRT entrance on the other side of the road, so I crossed an overpass and kept walking. If worse came to worst I’d jaywalk the giant highway. I could see the sign for Or Tor Kor on the other side tempting me.
Finally! And entrance! And an exit 3 that was open! It took me underground to the entrance to Or Tor Kor. Oh hurray!
Giant pieces of durian, mangosteens grouped by size, local yellow plums. I’d made it.
Or Tor Kor Market
Mo Chit BTS Skytrain
Kamphaeng Phet MRT subway
Open daily from early to late, unlike the Chatuchak Weekend Market
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