Marketing

I got up relatively early this morning to go to the famous El Rastro flea market, which runs every Sunday in the Plaza de Cascorro.

At first, it seemed small and disappointing- just a couple of dozen stalls selling old clothes, cheap jewelry and tacky tat still in the plastic it was wrapped in at the factory in China.

But then I realised that the stalls extended all the way down the Calle de la Ribera de Curtidores, so it was actually dozens of dozens of stalls selling old clothes, cheap jewelry and tacky tat still in the plastic it was wrapped in at the factory in China.

Then at the foot of the Calle de la Ribera de Curtidores, I found a plaza with stalls selling bits of old junk: old cameras and watches, CDs and DVDs, old computers, and the other sorts of things that nobody wants that clutter up thrift shops.

And finally, I found the narrow side streets with the real treasures – chandeliers, furniture, religious artifacts, candlesticks, oil paintings, urns and other goodies. The markets may have originated around the Calle de la Ribera de Curtidores, but they’ve metastasised to envelop the entire neighbourhood.

I didn’t buy anything, due to the difficulties of transporting anything into Australia, and the issues of trying to find out how much something might cost with a seller who doesn’t speak English. I did try for one item, a little enamelled metal icon of a saint; I gave the vendor my phone on the Notes app and indicated for him to write down the price. He wrote something about “75, but 16”. I suspect he meant that the icon was part of a set including some nearby earrings, but he made no motion towards them, so that’s pure conjecture on my part. Eventually, I just gave up.

After the previous day’s overindulgence in booze, I took a rare alcohol-free day, and just had a dinner of supermarket salad and juice in my cell.