lisbon stories :: feira da ladra

hello hello there my friends, how are you doing today? are you planning on having a rocking tuesday? i have some errands to run, but errands that are quite joyful actually! i will meet my mother-in-law for some shopping (still need to choose a dress for my nephew’s baptism next saturday!) & lunch! i already did… let’s say that h&m never fails on me to spend very little & to have a fab dress! even with shops going crazy with the sales season, i was able to find something cute! well, but moving on… last weekend i went to another typical event that happens every tuesday & saturday, which is the biggest flea market we have here and it is well known. this flea market seems to be happening since… the 13th century (yes, we are that old), but moved from place to place until it stood in one place, which is the place we currently know, somewhere between graça & alfama (if someone disagrees, please, do let me know, but i have an extreme difficulty in understand when one starts and the other neighbourhood ends!), in a square called {campo de santa clara}.

i think that every time i was in this flea market i passed by the man that sells all the vintage cameras! i never talked to him, but i suspect that we could have a very interesting conversation! i love all the film cameras and lenses he has… one day… one day i will buy something from him! the vintage case with the price handwritten on it is priceless! why waste a cardboard? why not write in the vintage case and ruin it?

vintage radios, old tins and newspapers are some of my very favourite as well! i love this radio in mint… oh i would love it on my house. but i also must confess that i am not that addicted buyer from flea markets. actually the market is huge and i must wander for a few hours to find the things i like. and when i arrive home and look through all these pictures, just then i realize how pretty these things are. because in the middle of a lot of junk you find, sometimes beauty is hard to be noticed.

oh old soda bottles, tins and china… so pretty… i guess that things will look prettier if the owner sets the “shop” in a pretty way. sometimes you just look at things that have “stolen” written all over it. and when you go to a flea market you expect to find things that have a story… or at least you imagine it that way.

i also love finding old letters, stamps… and magazines. through magazines you can see a bit of the culture back then… there is a lot of visual representation of what was expected from a woman.

ok, so i had this idea of buying some vintage pair of glasses, so that i could change the lenses… and when i found this lady selling all these glasses i thought it was heaven…but i am not able to choose any pair, because i must be honest. when i look at these i just think about the old ladies and old men that once wore these and are now probably dead. i can’t. i never bought anything to wear that was second-handed… and mostly because of this idea of who has worn this before. though i love the idea when i see other people doing it… until now, i was never able to do it.

 

also, i know that in photography we are supposed to avoid taking pictures in bright sunlight, but here’s the deal… lisbon is a bright sunny city… almost all the time. and it is a white city. so, this means, that sometimes even at 9am, the sun is already too bright. of course that when compared to the 1pm sun, it is not as bright, but still… too much bright. so this also means that it was quite hard to make this photo session, because a) the sun was too bright, b) with that much sun, sometimes i can’t even see the picture i take, and it’s hard to find a shade to do that properly. so, this also contributes for my learning process, of course.

and now my friends, though it was supposed to be published today, {local markets} will be exceptionally published tomorrow! today was really a crazy day and i must go out again for a bit of family time! i hope you have enjoyed these images from the flea market… the one called {feira da ladra}, that has been happening for at least 800 years.  see you tomorrow!

ps. have you seen the news on {poppies are red} cotton totes?