Si Racha Mall & Toyota Dealership

Still having problems figuring out how to process and order my Thailand photos and notes. Here’s something that seemed to stand alone – my trip to the mall in Si Racha, most specifically the in-mall Toyota dealership.

So I’m in Si Racha, hanging out with Jessada and Poksang at Poksang’s wedding studio, and Jessada has to run an errand of some sort, so I’m Poksang is taking me out shopping. He asks if I want to just wander the neighborhood, or if I want to go to the giant mall around the corner. The mall piqued my interest – I imagined it as very different than an American mall, so we went there.

The mall basically consisted of two halves, on half a giant Robinson department store, analogous to any department store you might see in the states. The same brands, the same crappy displays, only with some more Thai differences, and a little less polished than an American store. It was huge, too, I think the whole mall, and therefore the department store, was five stories. They also sold knockoff LEGO, right alongside regular LEGO.

The other half was five spiraling stories of regular businesses. There were a staggering amount of mobile phone stores on one level that all seemed to be selling the same phones in competition with one another. We’re talking like 20-30 small stores, just selling mobile phones, all next to one another. Thai people are all about mobile phones – I didn’t see one land line that’s wasn’t a pay phone the whole time I was in the country. The bottom two floors were especially chaotic and busy, with lots of stalls. There’s something about Thai retail that’s a lot closer to swap meet culture than American retail. The same chains were everywhere – KFC and something called “The Pizza Company” are huge – I think there’s some kind of Italian food/pizza surge going on in Thailand right now. It’s bad how many Kentucky Fried Chicken joints there are in Thailand – it’s like the Colonel himself is some kind of beady-eyed colonial power.

There was a really cool “snack bazaar” on the bottom floor. Thais are always eating and snacking – I have no idea where they put it all. I felt like a pig the whole time I was there and I was usually eating less than everyone else! I had my first “in country” jelly drink at the Si Racha mall, made up of sweet syrup, ice and stringy bits of grape & cardamom flavoured jelly that was being shaved off of a huge block ( about 12″x8″x 36″) suspended on a grate over a giant bowl by a young woman. I couldn’t even begin to describe the sheer range of snacks at the mall.

I think my visit to the top floor of this mall is when I first became aware this crazy epic movie of King Chulalongkorn the Great (better known as Rama V) that’s in theatres in Thailand right now. It appears to be a semi-fantastical, Lord of the Rings-ish (as in shooting style) retelling of the life of King Chulalongkorn, who basically brought Thailand into the modern era, reigning in the last half of the 19th century. He abolished the slavery that many rural Thais lived in, introduced the Western calendar, paper money, granted religious freedom to non-Buddhists, created a basic parliamentary system and most importantly formalised and finalised Thailand’s borders as we know them today. Thais are crazy about their king, and their monarchy in general, which is a whole post on its own, and Rama V is the big dog of the historical Thai monarchy. The movie seems to portray him as a armoured, musket toting badass, and it’s probably the one thing I didn’t get to see in Thailand that I wanted to.

The Family Show/In Mall Toyota Dealership

Thai car/vehicle culture is insane. As a Californian, the Thai fixation on vehicular transport immediately resonated with me. I saw more awesome vehicles in Thailand in a week and a half than I see in a year in Los Angeles, and I live in a town that’s famous for the sheer number of classics driving around. Like the whole issue of the significance of the Thai monarchy – Thai vehicle culture is probably a series of separate posts.

In Si Racha, I saw one of the craziest things I’ve ever seen in a mall. First – a mall in Thailand isn’t the sleepy music zombietown that most American malls are, they’re busy, tight active spaces. So the whole mall kind of had the energy of what’s pictured above. A huge crowd gathers at what I’m told is a semi-permanent Toyota dealership inside the mall. It was a Sunday, so I imagine that this is a bit more of a crowd than they have on a Tuesday morning.

The first time I encountered the dealership two models in matching red dresses were working the crowd with a sort of untiring, aggressive joy. Later, when I was on a floor above the dealership, the models had retreated behind the stage, while a group called The Family Show got up and did a series of light acrobatics and sideshow tricks. My mind immediately went to The Aristocrats, but the show was pretty tame. The father did pick up a chair with a fat kid in it with his teeth, spin a table around his head with his teeth, juggle his daughter with his feet (seen above) and invite audience members up to bend rebar around his neck. I never saw the mother do anything besides assist and introduce the act, and the daughter seemed to be in heaven when she was being tossed around in the air. The crowd went crazy for this – given the sheer number of tricked out, brand new cars I saw in Thailand, I imagine that selling cars there must be highly competitive. Watching that guy put his teeth to the test made my teeth hurt, though.