Move or Lose Your Shop

Move or lose your shop. Tag someone who could not stay calm here. In Thailand there is a market where the fruit and the fish are laid out on the ground between two railway lines, and about eight times a day a real train comes through it.

Imagine you are buying prawns there. You hear a horn. Everyone around you starts moving, without hurrying, the way people move when they have done something a thousand times. Awnings fold back. Baskets slide backwards. And then the train is going past, close enough to touch, and you are standing against a wall of shopfronts watching it pass. When the last carriage has gone, the awnings come out again, the baskets slide forward, and somebody finishes weighing your prawns.

The local name for it means the folding umbrella market. It is in Samut Songkhram, about an hour and a half southwest of Bangkok. The railway line opened in nineteen oh five, so the sellers and the train have been sharing this ground for well over a century.