OCTOBER 31, SUNDAY

ELEONAS “GYPSY” FLEA MARKET

OCTOBER 31, SUNDAY

ELEONAS “GYPSY” FLEA MARKET

After breakfast this morning I looked up the Eleonas Flee Market. I read that I should go to the Eleonas metro station and then start looking until I found it and was prepared to get lost again. But these are the actual directions. Get on the Nikaia line subway at Syntagma Square. Go three stations and when half the train empties with people carrying empty bags you just follow them. Follow these hundreds of people with empty bags, people of every ethnic origin, and you will encounter a stream of hundreds of people with full to bursting bags who are heading back to the subway.

Within a few hundred feet you will happen on people selling their wares on the side walk squeezed in by haphazardly parked cars which leave only a little lane for traffic to slide through. From then on there is bedlam, you have reached the flea market, half of which is inside old metal warehouses and half is outside.

There are some beautiful things, but beautiful things are not why people come.

The haggling is over shoes and toys and plants and toiletries and clothing of all sorts, almost all of it looks used, and if it is electronic shows little likelihood that it will work.

Sellers are there to unload stuff that no one wants and buyers are there to get staples as cheaply as possible.

There are no set prices. If you show any interest at all you might be followed by a loud voice down the street.

There is constant haggling, with buyers pointing out flaws and sellers ecstatic about their sad looking wares.

I also got the impression that 80% of the people selling or buying were not born in Greece.

It seems to be a way that people living on the margins can continue to survive.

There is desperation on some people’s parts, but a lot of sellers looked totally glum, as if this were the last place on earth that they would like to be on a Sunday morning.

There is very little of the sweet tempered Greek friendliness or politeness that I have become used to.

There is a good deal of pushing through the narrow aisles in a singleminded search for bargains. It is a very lively place.

But it wore me out and I spent the rest of the afternoon sleeping and processing the photographs that I took, unobtrusively I thought, with almost no one noticing me except for this striking woman in red who sensed my interest after I had photographed her unobtrusively,

I thought, a number of times, looking like Eeyore up in the sky as if looking for honey, as I shot blindly hoping for the best which turned out to be quite good. She not only refused to pose voluntarily for me, but was ready to knock my block off, and was joined by women shopping at her stall who told me to leave her alone, which I most gladly did, remembering suddenly, like Eeyore, that I had business elsewhere. Another lesson in bad crosscultural interaction.