Pictures From Uruguay: Street Market

Today, I give you a bunch of pictures from the Tristan Narvaja street market, which is every Sunday morning/afternoon in Montevideo, and is only a short walk from  my house.  This market originally went along Tristan Narvaja street, from 18 de Julio (the main downtown street) to where Tristan Narvaja ended, some 7 blocks down. But later it expanded in lateral directions and today it sprawls over around a 20 block area, making it one of the largest open-air street markets in the world.  It has a large number of food products (a farmer's market), antiques, books, clothing, and these days just about everything else.

Here's one of various stalls with pets and pet products. This one has some pretty standard birds, but there are some stalls that have far more exotic birds (including ducks, turkeys, chicken, but also parrots and other semi-tropical birds).  There's also stalls with snakes, spiders, axolotls, turtles, cats and puppies obviously, and once I even saw a monkey.

Here's some antiques.

Here's a bunch of quartz, amethyst, and other crystals. These are all native to Uruguay, which has some of the biggest supplies of these semi-precious crystals in the world. They're ridiculously cheap here. Having known what these sold for in new-age shops in Canada, I often thought that if you could somehow come back to north america with a suitcase full of these you'd be able to pay off your ticket here.

Here's a view that gives you an idea how big this is. Note: this is one of the Side-Streets, it's not even the main market street.

Here's a mixed stall of various junk for sale. Including some old bialetti-style coffee makers (which are really good, new). The main street tends to have the best antiques and is the most orderly. Then the farther away you go from the main street, the more disorganized the market becomes, until eventually its just local people doing what amounts to a garage sale of any old stuff they have to sell:

And it keeps getting more post-apocalyptic as you go:

You can even buy furniture here:

Anyways, that's it for today. If you ever visit Montevideo, be sure to be there on a Sunday to check out the street market, because it's a really fantastic time to spend quite a few hours.

RPGPundit

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