Today I went to visit the flea market behind our house again. When I was there last week I didn´t like it very much: I felt that people are selling simply everything when it´s of no use to them. What about gifts they never liked, and memories...but today I felt different about it.
Nobody must buy or sell something there, people come to have fun. It´s fun to look over the tables and search for nice items and it seems to be fun, too, to sit behind the desk and watch the potential buyers go by.
I used to like flea markets a lot in former years and then didn´t visit them for a long time because of my schedule. Times changed since then, or it´s only this market, but this here is really cheap. You can get every item you like, shoes, clothes, often baby clothes, even parts of pipes, used tools, bags, tomato plants, used electronic items, household items, body care products, cheap jewelry, cd´s, long play records, computer games, bikes, toys, even food...whatever anybody could like to have.
There are lots of different people there, from many countries. I noticed many people from Poland, India, Africa, Afghanistan were there and they try to sell what people from their country might like. I like people from Afghanistan best on the market :-). You can even see poor people who try to sell something because they need the money, but most do it for fun.
Today I looked for fake jewelry which can be just as nice as the real stuff. A lot of fake Pandora is available there. I liked it a lot when I first noticed that some of my female colleagues are wearing the bracelets. The charming idea behind it is that you can add different elements of different materials. They´re quite expensive and I dismissed the thought of starting a bracelet myself when I remembered that my good grandma died a long time ago. She would have liked to give me elements as a gift :-).
Of course someone copied the idea and now I can buy a starter set on the flea market with five elements for 2 Euro...this is cheap. I like the glass elements very much...and while I looked through all of them I thought again, who can produce these pieces so nice and cheap? Who assembles the cheap, nice bracelets for people who are not creative enough to do it themselves, like me? Are they able to live from this job? Would they be able to buy these things themselve?
Yesterday I saw a movie in tv about women in Bangladesh who produce clothes for german discount markets. I swear, their faces were so thin, they couldn´t even afford to buy enough food for themselves. It cuts in the heart to see it, and I wonder what can I do best to help these women? Not buy the items they make? Buy lots of them to give them heaps of work and hope they´ll get a raise? I´m not sure at all.
I must confess...I bought bracelets there. And one from Marocco, too.
