Open Air Treasure, Trash, Beer, and Sausages
- You travel down an industrial side street in the outskirts of Prague. The street is rammed with people from the tram stop to the entrance. Pushing down the narrow lane between car parks, the crowd shuffles at a hectic pace to get to the massive flea market at u Elektry tram stop. It doesn't matter if you get there when it opens at the crack of dawn or a few hours later; it is ALWAYS crowded.
Put your coins in the turnstiles and shamble on in with the other barely-awake early birds at 8am on a Saturday morning. You've just entered the biggest flea market in the Czech Republic. The Prague Flea Market website just calls it Bleší Trhy, or 'flea market.' You could also call it the Giant Open Air Gypsy Mall and Ukrainian Social Club.
Come one, come all! Miles of trash and treasure (though mostly trash)!
How did I get addicted to flea marketing? Why would a giant with a bad back bend over on a hungover Saturday morning to rummage through heaps of trash looking for bits and bobs that will pile up in a closet somewhere at home?
I don't know. How does any addiction start? Maybe we should go back to the beginning, where the first taste was free. All I know is I got hooked. BAD.
First Flea Market
Grammy took us to the flea market in Southern Oregon when we were kids. We whined. We didn't want to watch her rummaging through other people's rows of trash searching for her elusive 'pre-war ruby red glass.' It was embarrassing. Can't we go to the mall like normal middle class kids, Grammy? But there was no mall in that small town; only a flea market. And our granny survived the Great Depression, so thrift was her middle name. Grammy Thrift Robinson.
She promised to buy us something to distract our hyperactive 5 and 7 year-old selves. A toy? A slushy? We shut up and jumped in the old Oldsmobile. It smelled like dust, hot metal, burnt vinyl, and Grammy's rose-scented perfume.
I don't remember much about that fateful day in the mid-70s, but I will never forget this: among the trash and bric-a-brac we found our first comic book, The Amazing Spider-Man #122. It featured an evil green goblin on a rocket surfboard and a dude in a spider suit holding a dead girl. Everything needed to fuel our active imaginations. And it cost only a nickel. We read and re-read that precious comic book until it was dog-eared. We bought other issues in the series. Twenty years later, we had the entire collection of the Amazing Spider-Man from #1 to #300.
It turned out that #122 was highly collectible and worth a lot more than the issues just after. At one point it was worth $5,000, but that was long after we sold the whole collection for college money. Muh.
Since then, whenever I saw an open lot full of tables and tents, something tingled up and down my spine like a spider sense. More of an itch. I'd call it a flea sense.
Žižkov Flea Market
I found the Žižkov Flea Market by accident while riding a tram through the popular Prague suburb on a Saturday several years ago. Žižkov touches the center, so it's not really a suburb. It's also the pub capital of Prague and maybe Central Europe. Žižkov is a puburb. Right before the tram took me out of The 'Kov and out to my industrial ghetto known as Libeň, it passes Nákladové nádraží Žižkov. I looked to the right and saw a fence with large, hand-written signs screaming BLEŠAK! SLEVA! KAŽDY PA, SO, NE!
I didn't need to Google what 'blešak' means (I did that later); through the fence I saw hundreds of people milling about in a giant open air space with tables and tents on the concrete grounds. Yup. This right here is what we call a flea market.
When I finally had a free Saturday (where I woke up before noon), I ventured over to the Žižkov Flea Market. As I entered the vast parking lot a man approached me with his hand out. 'Great,' I thought, 'Accosted by touts already.' But the man was in fact the door man (parking lot man?) asking for a token 10 crown entry fee. He pointed to a sign that said 'symbolic entry 10 kc.' I paid, thinking about the symbolism. Oh, I get it. Symbolic means Just Enough Not to Piss Off the Flea Marketeers but Just Enough to Keep the Bums Out. Right. Let's go see the fleas.
First Find
My first trip turned out to be a minor win. After milling about through tents and tables selling the most useless scraps of nothing I'd ever seen, I found something interesting. It was a ceramic mug with a butt-ugly face on it. The two drunk men assessed the find, sized me up, and asked 30 crowns. The second man said 'it's as ugly as your mug' to his friend and I laughed. They had been boozing heavily and it was only 10am.
Then he offered me a box of free stuff containing random odds and ends and a broken lamp. The wooden lamp was in the shape of a tobacco pipe with a hollowed out end for matches and such. It looked old and rustic. Like me. So I took the two pieces and made a point to fix it one day. All I needed was some wood glue. And some luck that the wiring still worked. I wasn't about to risk getting zapped by 240V Euro-current trying to fix the old thing.
Meet the Flea People
Over the course of that summer I learned a few vital things about flea marketing. Number 1: wear a hat or your scalp will get sunburned. Even at 9am before the day heats up, spending an hour or two shuffling across a big parking lot will scorch your exposed skin. I wear a straw hat with a wide brim to keep my head cool and my neck from reddening. Number 2: learn how to haggle in Czech. Since Czechs hate to haggle, this makes it all the more fun. Especially if your Czech is as bad as mine. Number 3: the flea market sellers are often far more interesting than their merchandise.
After a few visits you start to see who the regular sellers are. They have the tents. The ones with the folding tables are just unloading granny's attic for beer money.
Nazi Culture?
One of the sellers had piles of military merchandise with a very German feel to it. Badges and pins with words like Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe. Old belts, scabbards, knives, and shell casings. Right about the time I was wondering if the seller kept the Nazi stuff hidden in the back, I overheard an American voice behind me:
“Well, this is certainly a fine display of Nazi culture in Prague,” he opined to his lady friend.
After the squeamish Americans left, the seller approached me. When he found out I spoke English, he exclaimed 'EEENGLEEEESSSHHH, AAAAHHHH!' and then offered me a shot. I could tell he was sauced by the smell of his AAAAAHHHHH. It must have been strong stuff. He was shitfaced. Not wanting to offend a drunken seller of sharp, rusty knives and possibly illegal Nazi swag, I took him up on his offer. I downed a shot. Then another. To be polite.
Drinking in a Parking Lot
A spring in my step, I proceeded onward. Then I saw a trailer peddling pivo and parek (beer and hot dogs). I pounced. An ice cold beer in a plastic cup is just the thing for flea marketing. I skipped the hot dog. That shit's all lips and assholes.
Soon I met a gypsy selling an impossibly ornate statue of a giant golden angel. The rest of his stuff was garbage. The angel was the centerpiece. FIVE THOUSAND CROWNS, he yelled at me. I smiled and quietly wondered how much he had paid. I'm guessing it was the old FIVE FINGER DISCOUNT, I didn't yell back.
In a flea market tent I met an elderly Czech man who spoke perfect English. I mean, with a British accent and all. After speaking with him for a while (and purchasing some bits and bobs for projects from him), I asked why his English was better than mine. He laughed and told me that he lived in the UK for 20 years as an antique seller. These days he wasn't selling much in the way of antiques, but he seemed to enjoy the conversation more than the business. We talked for hours over several weekend visits. Then it all came to an end suddenly.
R.I.P. Žižkov Flea
One fine Saturday I got off the flea tram stop and was hit with a shock: it was gone. Fenced up, walled in, and defunct. Thinking it was only a temporary closure, I approached what was previously the entrance. Nope. The Žižkov Flea Market was dead. The flea was no more. It had expired. It was an ex-flea.
All that remained was an empty concrete parking lot surrounded by chain-link fencing. The tents were gone; the tables were gone; the drunken Nazis were gone. But wait! There was hope! Signs posted all along the fence shouted the glorious announcements of a new and improved space: miles of new luxury flats for mafia fucks. Meh. That's just what we need in Prague. More places nobody can afford. Prague rents are climbing faster than Spider-Man after the Green Goblin, but what do the Czechs do? Build more luxury flats for mafia fucks.
But that's another story.
U Elektry Flea Market
Back to the present year. I had become fully entrenched in the flea scene, one of many insects scuttling across the massive 2-square-km parking lot at u Elektry tram stop in Vysočany 3 or 4 weekends per month. Sadly, the entrance fee went from 20 CZK to 30 CZK to 50 CZK – all in the space of a year. Greedy fuxes. Weirdly enough, this did not stop the hordes from pouring into the flea market in droves every weekend. For that price, I thought I should get there early so as not to miss any trashy treasures.
I tried going early in the morning around 8 am when I couldn't sleep (hell, that's as early as you will ever see my white ass outside). Rammed with rabble. I tried going at my usual time of around 10am. Heaving with humans. Finally I gave up, went with the old guru philosophy (Sum Dum Fuk), and just let it flow. Arrive when you want, rifle through the riff raff, and treat the whole damn thing like a fishing expedition. Some days you score a big fish, other days you just drink beer in the boat. Or on the bench. At the very least, I get to stretch my legs for an hour or two and drink beer at 10am. Which I rarely do. No, really. Stretching my legs sucks.
I Have a System
Whenever someone tells you they have a system for anything, run like hell. It's bogus. It's bollox. It doesn't work. But I have one, I tell ya, and it almost always/usually/never works, depending on Mars and the stars and random luck. So it's scientific.
I've noticed that most people enter the flea and proceed directly down the first row to the right. I did that as well, not wanting to go against the flow. The first row on the right after you enter is made up almost entirely of lighters, mineral water, batteries, and lunch meat (!) Because what the people crave while rummaging through garbage is some lukewarm cold cuts sitting un-refrigerated in a parking lot. Mmmmm. Salmonella. After a few disappointing weekends of following the unwashed hordes down disappointment lane, I finally make a grand leap: GO THE OPPOSITE DIRECTION, VOLE! When the eager masses went to the immediate right, I went all the way to the back of the the joint where people normally finished the rubbish race. My logic: while they were picking through the scraps, I would magically beat them to the undiscovered treasures lurking near the finish line.
And it worked! Well, once or twice. After weaving against the waves of weary folks going the opposite direction, I think I beat them to a bargain or two. So I would shake it up like that, week after week. Go clockwise one Saturday, then go counter-clockwise the following Saturday. The only thing that remained the same: I would plunk my weary ass down at the far end of the flea and have a beer. Never a grilled sausage, no matter how good that greazy shizzle smells. It's all lips and assholes.
Heights of Ecstasy, Depths of Despair
I brought a friend to the flea. As a flea fan, he liked the fishing expedition and had no idea what he would find. Like me. We passed rows of trash and treasure on several occasions, and we often walked out of the dump with some pearls. If not, we could at least drink beer at 10am with impunity.
One particularly fine Saturday morning, I was rummaging through the refuse for my specific type of trash: old metal/glass lamps made in Czechoslovakia. After conquering my initial fear of high voltage, I had managed to rescue and repair several old metal lamps with glass shades from the 30s, 40s, and 50s. Well, most of them didn't have the shades, which is why they were so cheap. But now I have managed to fill my flat with more lamps than anyone could possibly use at any given time. They don't just light up my flat. They light up my life.
So while I was digging for glass lamp globes to fit onto my many metal lamps in my closet, my friend scored a find which had him laughing out loud.
“Look at it! Its a two-headed dragon!” he exclaimed. After he bought it he found he had another epiphany: “The heads are articulated and move separately!” he laughed. I told him it was the most joy I had ever seen 50 crowns bring, and we both had a laugh.
After our celebratory beers, we left the flea. Then my friend cried out WAIT! MY WALLET! It had gone missing somewhere between the dragon and the beers. We were already outside the turnstiles where you pay to go in, but he had already thrown another coin down the gaping maw of the greedy machine to go back in to find his wallet.
Twenty minutes later, the waves of flea ecstasy had ebbed into trickles of despair: my friend was pick pocketed. God. DAMMIT. Greedy fuxes.
Ready to Return
Spring has nearly sprung in Prague, and I'm ready to dive back into the heaps of crapola out in the U Elektry Flea Market. I haven't been out there for months, mainly because of the winter. The number of vendors cuts in half and it's not nearly as fun sitting on a frosty bench drinking beer from a plastic cup.
I strongly recommend a trip to the U Elektry flea market. It's a great walk in the open air, and recycling and up-cycling is much more earth friendly than buying new Ikea stuff. And you don't have to spend hours assembling anything.
So I plan to return to find the missing parts for my many unfinished projects soon enough. Hopefully they won't raise the damn entrance fee again. Although there is a bright side: fewer people will crowd through the turnstiles if the price keeps going up.
And that makes it that much easier for me to find that rare, dusty/rusty vintage tchotchke I'm looking for. What exactly is it that I'm looking for, you ask? I'm not telling.
I would hate to have competition.