Yesterday a strange phenomenon appreared. Piles of trash and abandoned household items crowding every street I walked down. Old torn furniture, outdated electronics, forgotten dolls and stuffed animals, garage sale clothing, gutted cupboards and doors, and any other scrapped piece of home imaginable constituted piles that were bigger than trucks. Watching the pile in front of our apartment from the window, we noticed that there was hardly a moment when hunched and babushka-ed women or their male counterparts weren't meticulously picking through these piles.
As I walked to a cafe and back along different side streets today, I noticed that some of the pile-pickers (still out in full force) had settled in with their piles, and seemed to be camping out and guarding them. Though I saw some stuff (old typewriter!!, weird dolls) that I wanted, it did not seem like a good idea to reach into any of these piles for fear of being yelled at in Hungarian by a (gasp) gypsy. When Carolina and I reconvened, we talked over the situation and drew some conclusions:
-the pile-pickers were mostly gyspies
-they had left their gypsy possies to watch over their piles
-they would sort out the best stuff, and sell, haggle, or trade the goods for stuff from other gypsies' piles
-we still don't know why the trash was there in the first place
Carolina got a sick skateboard deck from an un-guarded pile though. with some wheels we might make it work. watch out.
*amended: we got the sickest street art on tabletop from a pile.
tomorrow we're goin pickin
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This imagery calls to mind that strange segment from Labyrinth, where Sarah eats the poisoned peach and ends up back in her room (which is in that dismally lit, mega-sized junkyard with all those little puppets who have mounds of trash on their backs).
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