Ecseri Flea Market

Yesterday we visited a big flea market that is well-known here in Budapest - Ecseri Használtcikk Piac.  Literally translated,  Ecseri (name of the street it's on) Used Article Market.  It was a fun place to visit and if transporting items home were no problem, we could probably have been in serious shopping danger there:  awesome old Christmas ornaments, old tin toys, lots of art and "art",  beautiful traditional Hungarian embroidered linens and clothing, etc. etc. etc.  A few visual examples:

Don't know why, but I love this chimp...

I see an awesome birdbath/water feature for my sister's yard.

If I didn't have to bring it home on a plane, this lamp would be coming with me!

Booth no. 36 is the one that stopped me in my tracks, however.

A visceral reminder of my dad and my childhood:

My dad was a collector, and one of his largest and most beloved collections was of Matchbox cars.  Our whole family spent many hours at places that looked a lot like this, with people that shared my dad's love for Matchbox.  Matchbox cars:  not Hot Wheels, not no-name cheap-plastic-junk miniature cars, but Matchbox - die-cast, scale-model, the real deal.  In fact, Matchbox is such a part of my childhood story that they say I would call one of my first friends - a little boy who lived next door to us - outside to play by rattling my bucket of cars.

I'm sure I still have one of those red double-decker buses.

Some still in the boxes.  That's always a good sign.

He's asking about $5 each for the ones on this shelf...

...and the ones on this table are going for about $2.

Dad would have loved this.  And he probably would have wanted to stay at Booth 36 way longer than I did.  Though Jeff and I did spend some time looking at old Budapest postcards there.  We bought three.  (They'll be easily packed away in the luggage!)  Then the siren call of other people's trash called us to keep looking...








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