Roasted nuts and indifference

As mentioned previously, Bangkok is a pretty chaotic place. The sounds are constant and grating, the air so dense with exhaust that it can choke you, the major thoroughfares all teeming with tourists and an endless army of Thais looking to sell them something.

But all you have to do is turn the corner.

Just take a left, or a right, and then another and another, and get lost in a city that's made for it. The sounds of traffic recede, and the sounds of conversation become more clear. There are dogs and cats just roaming the streets. And you walk down a road with no traffic, and see nothing but storefronts. But these aren't the storefronts you are used to.

They are like dioramas of Thai life: one man fixing watches in a dank cove while his wife looks straight out the front of the shop -- at nothing. One family spread around a TV eating strange Thai snacks, while the mother sits at a sewing machine, frowning at the repetition. One short elderly woman, squatting with unnatural ease for her age and cutting her already short stature by half, sits over a pot of coals roasting nuts.

She looks just like Yoda to me. Yoda roasting chestnuts, or whatever kind of nuts these are. I don't even want to think what I look like to her, though it's probably something she's seen before. She just keeps rolling those nuts over with a stick, as if I'm not even there -- and unlike the rest of Bangkok, the only thing she's selling is indifference. Indifference and, eventually, roasted nuts.