/karen/

To market, to market

Saturday, 08 April, 2006

I just realised I never ever told you the story of how I planned to get up early and walk from our place to Glebe (good exercise) and then go visit the markets, and instead I ended up dreaming about doing it instead and woke up at 1 pm.

This morning, despite doing the incredibly stupid thing of going to bed at 2 am (for the love of blogging), Ben and I got ourselves up and went to Malcolm and Julia's for a church prayer breakfast. Unsurprisingly, numbers were down. But we had a lovely time, praying for each other, for our church and for our link missionaries, and eating pea and haloumi fritters, fried tomatoes and pancakes with jam (?) and ricotta. I decided that this was the day I was going to carry out my little plan and I happened to mention it to Bron.

“Oh, can I come too?” she said.

Seeing no earthly reason why not, I said, and so we set off, waving goodbye to Ben and the others who were going to make a trip down to Nowra for the day to set up things for the Create weekend away.

The walk took about 45 mins and it was quite a pleasant one because we went through Sydney Uni and found this wonderful fragipani tree that I went crazy over, snapping pictures for a future blog design (hopefully for Issue 10). We also went past the Quadrangle and the Great Hall and stood there, looking for the kangaroo gargoyle.

Upon arriving at the markets, Bron realised she had completely forgotten her wallet and I realised that the $5 I thought I had was actually $2 (forgot I bought eggs yesterday). We both thought that this was kind of a bonus because it meant we wouldn't be spending lots of money. The markets were fun—definitely trendier than all those years ago when I bought a silk singlet top for $5 and an old paperback of C.S. Lewis's The Pilgrim's Regress (did I buy that there??) but thankfully not as trendy as the Paddington Markets—certainly with nowhere near as many designers and a few more secondhand (and vintage) clothes stalls. Everyone seemed to be on sale (or at least have a couple of sale tables or sale bins out)—selling off their summer stock. Most of the stalls were for clothes but there were a couple which sold secondhand CDs (must bring Ben) and secondhand books.

I was looking for a dress but I was being very picky; I'm always picky about clothes but I'm picky mostly because I'm lazy. See, I got this dress a couple of years ago that I think is almost the perfect lounge-around-the-house type of dress. It's navy blue, it's made of a very light cotton fabric (perfect for hot days), it's modest but also sleeveless, and I got it for $2 at, of all places, a Supré shop in Wollongong (even though it's not actually Supré). I wished I had another one just like it but all the dresses I saw were either 1) really really ugly; 2) too dressy for a lounge-around-the-house dress; 3) totally immodest (sorry, can't wear halter tops or sleeveless; I get too cold. Plus I can't stand the thing that some guys do when their eyes flick down to your breasts when you're talking to them, and then flick up again and then down again and they don't even know that they're doing it); or 4) too expensive. I saw this gorgeous pink dress that looked like it was made out of Thai silk but probably wasn't. It was $15 but I couldn't justify buying it because I didn't need a Special Occasions sort of dress—I already have a number of those.

It is interesting to go shopping with someone whose taste is slightly different than yours—sometimes you pull out the same things and ooh and aah over it, and sometimes she pulls out something that you never would have but it makes you see it the way she sees it and expands your horizons a little. It's very cool and it reminds me of this quote that my friend Jose loves so much:

Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.

(Anaïs Nin)

Bron and I found this stall which sold India Fox-type clothing—floaty very light silk cotton tops, dresses and skirts where a Large is actually a Small—and everything was reduced to $10. We got some money at the local 7-Eleven (where there was a queue of all these girls who were in the same boat as us), then came back. I got a beautiful pink silk top that's almost long enough to be a dress except you wouldn't wear it as a dress (the lady told me it was made from old saris. Some of the others like it, however, hadn't been colour-coordinated very well, but this one was pretty good). Bron and I both got knee-length wrap-around skirts, even though both of us were well aware of the dangers of wrap-arounds and how wrap-arounds don't normally work on us. But they had a bit more material to wrap around than normal wrap-arounds and hers was orange and mine was black and they were both shot through with silver thread which made them look very pretty.

Then we walked back and parted ways at Stanmore station, I went home and ate fried rice for lunch while reading High Fidelity (Nick Hornby) and slept all afternoon. I just finished it and it made me appreciate again how good the adaptation to film by John Cusack was, despite the fact it's Hollywood. I think I might re-watch the movie this evening. It amuses me that it ranks as Number 4# on Ben's Top 5 Movies of All Time because I wanted to see it first and I liked it first because aspects of it reminded me so much of him.

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