Excerpt: Encyclopedia Bangkok

Chan: the road that takes me from home to work and home again. Along it, time marked by markets. In the morning Chan Market, set back from the road in concrete, spills onto the pavement. Breakfast curries in heavy tin bellies, sweets and fruit, pandanus-wrapped packets of banana and sticky rice grilled ashy-hot. Monks gather at the soi corners for breakfast offerings. When the weather cools at the end of the rainy season, a bag of pa tong ko warms the hands, fried dough shapes leave the lips oily. The fish market, a little further down, up when the sun slicks the city - the point of morning when the heat and traffic thicken always seems to be the point at which the songtaew I'm in passes the fish market, or rather gets jammed between cars and bikes and inches along. Blood and brine run in the gutters, and glitter with scales, and a woman with her back to the traffic hacks the head off a mighty fish.