Walking through Bangkok's everyday theatres

Two walking tours provide a glimpse of daily life in Bangkok, far from the city’s malls and glamorous nightlife

- Shrabonti Bagchi

We eat century eggs standing in the alleyway next to a building that holds a warren of individual one-room homes—much like Mumbai's chawls, though these only occupy the ground floor.

There’s washing hanging behind us, and I can see people moving around in the dim interior of the flat next door, going about their daily activities seemingly indifferent to us, the onlookers, for whom this is quite the opposite of the ordinary. As someone steps out to keep an offering on the spirit-house we are standing next to, it strikes me how odd the act of travelling is. What is mundane and everyday for one becomes exotic and memorable for the other.

We are in the Trok Mor wet market in Bangkok, Thailand, determined to see the much-travelled city through a fresh lens though nothing is perhaps quite fresh in today's over-touristed world. The century eggs are certainly unique to me—dark brown-black inside and out, including the yolk, which looks a bit like blackcurrant jelly. Someone on the internet had described the smell as “wet socks left in the laundry bag for a week”, and they weren't far off, I think to myself—though I don't say this out loud, because my companion on the tour and the tour guide herself are eating them with great relish.