This month, the HOT Magazine team reviews one of the most exciting markets in Bangkok, sure to excite everyone and anyone who visits. Located in a smaller enclosure of the entire gargantuan Chatuchak Market, it is a fantastic way of spending a good weekend’s evening with friends, family or even by just casually strolling along nonchalantly on your own. You read it right, The Green Market opens at night, and is designed with a fantastic little mix between permanent installation and temporary stalls designed to give the entire place a more casual outlook.
Riddled with a variety of balance between food and accessories, the Green Market can have you staring over a large cloth on the ground covered with bargain watches, shoes or belts, just like it can have you wondering across more formal shops with their cute interior designing and modernistic style. Quarter flea market, quarter modernist boutique, half food and drinks venue and full excitement centre, the Green Market certainly is a cocktail of diversified themes that appeal to a vast array of individuals from different social classes and different places. Thais and foreign visitors alike all relish their time in this place, which is why it is always full of an assorted gamma of curious onlookers and passers-by.
The Green Market is best to be strolled between Thursday and Sunday from five o’clock in the evening until midnight (or even past that if you find one of the bars that makes it into the little hours of the morning). Plenty of terraces await you there, filled with a booming ambience of happy go lucky people ready to enjoy a good night out of both shopping, eating and last but not least, drinking. Beer towers and groups taking a break from the stress of the work days are common within the place, accentuated with the various kinds of music that is played to ease the desired vibe into people.
In the shopping front, there are many items that one can find in this market, especially clothes and vintage accessories such as real and genuine vintage vinyl discs, antiques, art of different types, collectables and old furniture amongst others. The Green Market is in and of itself very affordable, but of course, as is tradition in the Land of Smiles, one can use a grin or two to symbolically bargain the price off what are already cheap accessories and clothes.
Getting to the Green Market is very easy, on simply mounts the BTS from any station in the Sukhumvit network and makes their way all the way to the last northernmost station of Mo Chit. From there it’s a small walk up the Kamphaeng Phet Road. One can equally get the underground MRT metro, from which you should get off a station shy of the last northern end station, in Chatuchak. The walk from there is equally as short. Alternatively, you can always choose to travel in an easier more personal way with a taxi. Literally everyone knows the JJ Market so you will not have to strain yourself attempting to explain the taxi driver where you’re going – Just make sure you find the JJ Green Market, not its much bigger counterpart.
Have you not been to the Green Market yet? Then you’re definitely missing out.