Posts Tagged ‘shops’

Nightwatch Originally uploaded by itsjustanalias.

(you may spot that the photos have nothing to do with the posts at the moment… well done, that´s deliberate, a deliberate result of laziness)

Pilar said, as she was showing me the cupboards in the kitchen, the last person in here left the pans in such a state she had to throw most of them out. This was as she showed me the two pans in the place. Both small. Although she did show me the sandwich toaster, one of those early models, pre electrical, basically two metal plates and a clasp that you can put on the hob and burn stuff with. It doesn’t matter, she said, if you need anything you can get it from the Chinese across the street.

And lo, there is a Chinese bazaar across the street. It looks like a clothes shop, in the front there’s just cheap clothes, the kind you find on market stalls Europe-wide. But if you head back a little, the shop narrows and you walk past electrical goods so shoddy they’re sub market quality (I bought a number 1 radio, it doesn’t even say where it’s made, and of the four bands only two work: not that I expected much more).

After the electrical narrows, it opens out into six big aisles of the worst that China can offer. I bought a coffee maker which it turns out, can’t make coffee (it’s one of those stove top espresso machines, but it boils the water in the bottom and doesn’t filter through to the top, I guess I got what I paid for). There’s a row of gnomes, segueing into ceramic alsations that have ‘welcome home’ signs hanging from their tacky necks. There’s stuff that you would be insulted to be given as third prize in a free raffle.

I bought some pans, a blunt knife, the uncoffee maker, the number one two of four band radio and some batteries. We’ll see how long they last.