A Massive Street Market...on Friday?

The market basically filled every street...no parking, except on market day.

Look at all these goods...a consumers paradise.

A buying frenzy or just rearranging the piles?

The essential Friday Market purchase...these are known as, "I love you long long time", shoes. This seems to be global!

     Yesterday La Spezia turned into the biggest street market Nanc and I have ever seen. We are still trying to figure out the Italian week, like when they work, when their open for business, you know....just the regular routine. It’s Friday, wouldn’t they wait until Saturday for such a big street market?? It looked like every soul in town was there, how were so many people off work. The streets were jammed and most of them closed to auto traffic. When I say big market I mean BIG like with a capital BIG, name it and you could have found it to buy, unbelievable, clothing that was $1euro a piece or designer fashions for $100‘s of euros...all sold in very similar kiosks. I felt sorry for the regular store owners until I went into a couple stores and found they were packed also. One kiosk was built in a square (tables on all sides with 1 employee in the middle), they had folded and organized all there goods into neat, and organized sections...man that didn’t last long...when we walked by there must have been 30 people (or maybe more), surrounding this vendor and they were picking up pieces and then just tossing them back onto a pile, absolute disorganization. I can’t imagine buyers could have found what they wanted in this mess. We laughed out loud it was so funny. 
     Leaving the insanity of the market we headed over to the port in hopes of finding our car rental location,  in 2 weeks we leave for Alviano and we are renting an auto for the entire time we are there (2 months). It’s nice to know in advance where your going (we have found) so we thought we’d take, what we thought, was a nice little walk. Right! This place was a lot further than we calculated, we made it about 2/3rds of the way, and then headed back into town. We had always figured to cab it from the train station on the day, so no big deal...at least now we knew the right direction.
     So we headed back into the melee around lunch hour and just in time for school to get out. Not sure if it was out for the day or just siesta...but again we were amazed, there were 100’s of people waiting to pick up there kids. All I can figure is Friday is not really a day of work (except for those kiosks), it appeared to me most of the citizenry had a free day. Maybe it was some holiday I was unaware of.
     After we got back to town lunch was the 1st order of business, so we stopped at a little street cafe, much like all the others we’ve had such good luck with. Their menu promised the same regional food, without any real deviations, we sat down and made our selections. The only real difference with this particular Italian restaurant was it was run, and probably owned, by a Chinese family. They spoke fluent italian so we hoped they were fully integrated into the cooking as well...Right!  Nah, no such luck, we had our 1st blase meal here. Tasted like it came out of a can...an american can! Wish I could worn you away, but it was so mediocre, we didn’t even note the name. Put this one in the rearview mirror because most of these little joints are awesome.
     Made our way back to the chaos of the market and presto-chango its gone...a few remnants but not many. Capitalism at its finest...come in, create a frenzy of buying and then slip away quick. The crowds had disappeared too...my bet...Siesta was calling!    
     Another thing, we hear about Italy’s debt crises all the time and figured maybe a little personal austerity would be taking place, that just isn’t the reality in this part of the country. You should have seen this mob of buyers...there was no window shopping going on, these were hard core shoppers with euros in their pockets. Sure was fun to watch though...Nanc and I have definitely become non consumers. Food, wine and train tickets are pretty much all we spend our money on, (OK Gelato too). It’s not that we don’t see things we’d like, we just can’t overfill our suitcases with extras...just the essentials when you head around the world.