At the fair

I've been told my posts are too long. So today I'm doing a short one. You're welcome.

Like I've already mentioned in some post I think, there is a fair (or market?) at the city center every Sunday. I googled it on Saturday, because I wanted to know if it's only there for a morning, or also some time into the afternoon (it's there for the morning), and found out that it's officially an artisan or handcrafts fair, which I had not known.
Anyway, I went to the fair again on Sunday, mostly to get some fruits I can't seem to find anywhere else. And because I realised that despite having been to the fair twice by now, I don't think I have any general pictures from it. Only of my food.

And since I went there, I had some breakfast there, just to get some variety. And because it's not that expensive to eat breakfast there. Well, depends on what you eat. I actually had some bread this time instead of a tapioca. My bread had fried banana in it, with tucumã. I thought that was an interesting combination. And some cupuaçu juice.
(So now I have more pictures of my food at the fair...)

But while food is a relevant part of markets, so are the other stalls. It was hard to take pictures of things in shade on a sunny day line Sunday was, but I tried.

This is the kind of stuff you can find at a lot of the stalls there. So it's mostly souvenir-kind of things. Small wooden statues and key rings and... I'm not even sure what these things are at the front here. A lot of the statues and key rings are made of not only wood, but can have the base made of tucumã seeds or something like that. There are a lot of those. They are the really tiny ones, though, like the ones right behind what ever the things in the front of the picture are.

And then there are completely  different kind of things. Like this guy selling live fish for aquariums. Which, um... sure. Ok. Not a thing I could see happening in Finland. So this surprised me.

And of course there's the fruit vendors. They're why I went there in the first place. I couldn't actually find the fruits I was looking for, but I found some other fruits that I've been trying to find for a while but don't seem to be able to, so I had started to give up on them. So that was nice.

And people selling plants, because why not. I really want to buy a plant every time I see one of these, but then I tell myself to stop being an idiot, because I'm only here for a month and a half more, and it's not like I could take any of the plants with me when I leave. So no buying plants.

This picture is a great example of what happens when you try to take a picture of something partly in shadow and partly in the sun. It's not actually dark in the shadow. It's just ridiculously bright in the sun. But I thought I'd put this one up here anyway, because I wanted to show you the parrot-probably-wall-cloth-things. There are some of those too, with different designs, also other things than birds.

Jewelery is also really typical at the stalls, not only key rings and statues. A lot of the jewelery here is made of some wood and/or seeds of different things. Açaí seeds are really common in these. It's a palm, and the seeds are round, ~0.5 cm in diameter. So excellent size for making bracelets and necklaces. There are some of those in the lighter-colored necklaces farther back at the picture (the colorful beads), I'm not sure what the ones in the front are made of, since the beads in them are smaller and flat. But I wouldn't be surprised if they were some kind of seeds too.

I also ended up buying a few pão de queijos, too, because they're good, and because they're Brazilian, and because they only cost 50 (real) cents apiece. There were people who baked them there, at the market. Well, they had clearly made them ready before hand, and then just had an oven there to bake the ready-made balls. They were apparently pretty popular, too, because when I was buying them they had run out, so I had to wait for the next batch. And I wasn't the only one, they had more than half a dozen people there, waiting to get some. But it was worth it, because I wasn't in a hurry, and I got some fresh from the oven.

I also bought myself a mug. Because you have to have mugs from the places you go. Or maybe that's just me. Despite the fact that my mug-shelf at home is already almost overflowing. Either way, I hadn't so far found a good mug, but now I did. It doesn't really look like me overly much, but I like it in general.

The mugs are actually a good example why I found it a little weird that this is a handcrafts fair, because while there are a lot of people selling what are probably actually handcrafts, there are also a lot of stalls with essentially the same products. Those are the ones with the most souvenir-like things, the mugs and key rings and statues. But the fact that there are a dozen stalls with the exactly same stuff makes me doubt they're made by hand. Or at least that the people who are selling them definitely didn't make them themselves, because the guy in the next stall is selling identical stuff. But I don't know.

Oh, and apparently I didn't take a picture of all the stalls selling clothes. They are definitely not handmade. Basically you can find all kinds of clothes for sale there, starting from underwear and swimsuits. Which takes my mind at least to the question of who buys bras from a street vendor. There's (I assume, I haven't asked them) no way to try them on there in the middle of the street.
Anyway, as a person who hates shopping for clothes I mostly just ignore the clothes stalls. Which is probably why I don't have a picture of them.

Anyway, I hope this was short enough for you. (Well, it looks quite long, but it has a lot of really big pictures, so there is only little text.)

~matu

PS. I don't mean to rub in in your faces, by I am so happy I'm missing out on the pollen season this year, sounds like it's a really bad one.