5-28-06

Early every Sunday morning people start to congregate on the street directly behind our apartment. We hear them banging and clanging as the put together a temporary shopping mall along the street. And then the crowds come in, and whoever has a stand right outside of our balcony, and sells little dolls with microchip voice boxes, starts one up that plays until 5:00 in the afternoon, “Twinkle, twinkle little star, how I wonder what you are.” And there it stops, and there it starts over again, and again, and again, and continues to start from six o’clock in the morning until five o’clock at night.

Since I was up, I went out and walked through the crowds for a couple of hours. The market stretches from one end of Via Portuense to the other and is packed with stalls and people. I was interested to see that most of the stalls were selling cloths. There were a few that sold odds and ends, antiques, cookware, but most of them were selling clothes. The people in charge of the stalls usually stood on a step-stool in the middle of a large tarpaulin and shouted out their prices to those walking by. The people jostle about and stop suddenly to look at something causing everyone to bump into the people around them. It is not a place for the faint of heart, the claustrophobic, or the person who has a lot of cash in his or her pocket.

After about five o’clock the people start to pack up. You can hear them throwing things around and slamming doors for about an hour, and then you hear their trucks and trailers trundling off down the street. When they leave there are heaps of rubbish strewn across the street, old papers that protected the purchased antiques, or stuffed a knock off handbag blow into large piles. Then everything is quite for about an hour before the cleanup crews come and hose down the streets before blowing all of the refuse out from behind our house to a waiting truck, and as soon as they are gone the regular beeping, honking, yelling, throttling traffic resumes for another week.