A Series of Lasts

With just about three weeks to go we have started a series of “lasts”-last time to do something, last time to go to a certain restaurant or favorite spot.  This weekend was the last time going to our favorite flea market.  Sigh!

We found this flea market quite by accident a few years back and have been going regularly. It’s fun, its cheap entertainment, they make good churros there and sell cheap produce in addition to all the eclectic, weird and plain old used stuff. I love this flea market – it is so refreshingly different from the sterile shopping malls with their cooled down standard stores, their food courts and all their shiny new and often utterly useless, overpriced and/or ridiculous things that will look even more useless or ridiculous next year.

Our flea market is messy, loud, colorful, unconventional, often hot – always interesting, never sterile.  It sports countless sellers with their wares on cheap tables or directly on the floor, anything from clothing to toys, bikes, sometimes even vintage items, tools, electronics, crafts, housewares, stuff I don’t know what it is, Mexican music, a barber, produce stalls and a smelly fish monger  – everything. Over the last few years I have become rather good at finding things I need (well, okay, and many I don’t need but like) and can’t remember more than a handful of things I have not been able to find there (e.g. a pair of skiing pants for my son but then, hey, this is coastal California in mid-summer I probably won’t get one in the store either).  The trick is not trying to go for to many things, in all this chaos the mind can’t focus on too many different shapes and forms one needs to look out for when, for example, simultaneously looking for a tennis racket, a ornate frame that would look good when sprayed in hot pink and Pokemon cards.

To tell you the truth, going to a flea market when one really really can’t buy anything because whatever it is one buys one just needs to just pack it up and store it for a year is no fun, it is actually depressing.  But I wanted to go and found an excuse  and so we took one last stroll around the place bought a few mangoes, marveled at things we could have bought under normal circumstances and then left.

Ironically, for the first time in months I needed to go to the mall afterwards to buy some cosmetics for my upcoming business trip – and even this die-hard flea market aficionado does not get cosmetics there.  It was cool – which was a define plus on a day with mid-90s temperatures but that is all the positive I can say for it.  All the same stores, all the same stuff, all the same food, all so boring and so many people thinking that this is a great way to spend a brilliant summer weekend day.

It was definitely my last time at the mall – I wont miss it one bit.  The flea market, however, is a very different story …