The Trashman

This week I went out shopping with a big group of friends from church. Our first stop was referred to as "the Trashman." Apparently this guy has been collecting random things he found while going through recycling and now he has a store to sell it. The prices are great, but you have to be willing to sift through a lot of junk to find the treasures!

You can see in this picture just a small section of his store that we sifted through. I have socks in my hand because we were warned by people that had been here before that we would not want to touch anything... they were right! Things are just piled on top of each other throughout the whole store. A lot of it is covered in years of grime. I did find a few really cool things. I ended up only buying one of them, but I love it.

I bought the big yellow vase in the picture. It caught my eye from across the room full of junk. When I made my way over to it I saw that it had a lot of fun details on it that you can only see close up. I tried to take a picture, but its kind of hard to see. There are different pictures of mountains and Chinese scenes all over the vase.

I brought it home and scrubbed it up really well and now I'm trying to decide where I want to put it. For now its on the floor since its heavy enough CoCo can't knock it over. The gourds you can see in the picture of the vase were free. The "trashman" gave them to me after I bought the vase. He also gave me a random incense holder that was absolutely gross. Pretty much everyone that made a purchase had some random thing he knew he would never be able to sell foisted on them.

After the trashman we stopped at a really cool lamp boutique. The guy uses cool Chinese things to make lamps. I only took one picture there, but I'm in the process of convincing Nick we need this birdcage lamp. Everything in this store was so well made and fun. Sorry the picture is sideways, I tried 3 times to turn it, but it didn't want to cooperate today so I gave up.

The last stop of the day was a furniture store. It was a huge compound. There were so many cool things, but I don't really have any more space in our apartment. They do make custom furniture though and I saved the card so we can go back someday.