Everything You Want and Nothing You Need: The Naschmarkt (Day 79)

The Entertainer
Naschmarkt

Everything has a price, and on Saturdays in Vienna you can negotiate for it in the language of your choice. The problem is that at the Naschmarkt, as Vienna’s largest flea market is called; everything is priced accordingly. It is best therefore to leave your English at home. This wasn’t shocking at first, this is after all Austria, what is odd is that upon arriving at the scene (and it is “the scene” on Saturday morning), is that for the better part of a kilometer in central Vienna, German was not the lingua franca.

He'll Make a Special Deal -- Just For You
Dealer - Naschmarkt

They’ll sell you anything here. Having encountered two American tourists on the U-bahn (talking in English no less) who were excited to make it to the market I expected to find the usual collection of bootlegged CDs and mass-produced t-shirts. So when I ascended the stairs from Kettenbrückengasse to find myself confronted with a display that can best be described as a disassembled sink (all parts for sale) I was pleasantly surprised. But beyond the trays of faucets, the full wealth of those ridiculously excessive byproducts of capitalism that Marx complained about was on display. Without looking too hard one could find American license plates, shoes, coins of dubious authenticity, books that included such titles as “Paris ist eine Hure” (no translation necessary), old soviet bills (Hungarian?), typewriters, LPs, violins, an odd portrait covered in some vaguely red paint, an minstrel show statue that looked like it was a plucked out of a display deriding “Entartete Kunst,” clothes of all sorts, cell phone chargers, and of course, a board game based around the imminent attack of vampiric cows, all of which were stored in ubiquitous blue and yellow “premium banana” containers.

The Typical Display
Naschmarkt

For the faint of heart and the other six days of the week, the upper half of the Naschmarkt (the Naschmarkt proper) is a vast expanse of fresh vegetables, olive-proffering hawkers, and gastronomic variety. Most of it remains a open air market filled with heavily accented cried of “Grüss Gott bitte schön” [Basically: Hello, buy something] but a few more permanent shops have been set up (most of which have names that can be formed with the formula culinary category + unit of land, bio-world, cheese-land, Asia house, etc.) between which there is enough variety to satisfy everyone. I’m pretty confident that despite the durian (Debacle? Success? Depends on whether you like fruit that tastes like a four course Indian meal) the Society of Exotic Fruits may be making a comeback soon.

Bigger and Better
Naschmarkt

The general rule however is, if you see something, don’t buy it, it is bound to be cheaper two stalls later. The only question then is: when will I get up the courage to cook an octopus?