Saturday, July 22, 2006

Swap n' Shop.

Possibly the most pointless yet fascinating event to ever occur in Rosedale.

Basically, it's a huge weekly rendezvous of hundreds of people coming together to buy, sell, and trade their useless shit.

My dad just got married a few months ago and the process of moving into his wife's house is coming to a close. He has little left to do to finalize the sale on his house, but much to do with all the shit that came from his house.

Renee's house is pretty small as it is. Usually I spend the night there once a week, and while her son was in town I slept there once and it was decided that there is just not enough room for the four of us. It's a one-story, two-bed one-bath cute little abode but there is literally no space to function whatsoever. And all my dad's shit has to go.

And because the midwesterners were a little late to recieve the memo that the Mexicans were acomin', none of us are very good at Spanish. And Rosedale is a predominately Mexican town. My dad and Renee both teach school around the area so they've had their share of Spanish-teaching tapes in their cars (imagine hearing "Puerto. Puerto. Door." a thousand times). I know the Spanish words for door, eggs, hello, thank you, and numbers 1-14. Not enough to sell a dining room set.

This has been my second week doing Swap n' Shop. Last week was impossibly hot outside... luckily, today I was almost a little chilly, thanks to all the rain we've been getting. But we're usually there for hours. It's awful.

My first experience with a Spanish-speaking customer went something like this:

Guy: *Points at computer monitor.* "Quantos?"
Me: "...What?"
Guy: "Quantos?"
Me: "Oh. Computer monitor."
Guy: "No no. Quantos?"
Me: *Making the connection between quantos and quantity.* "OH. Like. Twenty bucks?"

Little did I know that you don't sell anything for twenty bucks at Swap n' shop. That was last week, and my dad sold that thing for fifty cents today.

I wish my camera worked. There were people there with their entire cars covered with little cheap dog sculptures and shot glass collections and just random stupid knick-knacks that no one is ever going to want. How do people even acquire so much useless shit? And more importantly, who would haggle with the seller over it?

Why?

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