Just what is Tristan Narvaja? Who is Tristan Narvaja? Who was Tristan Narvaja? What is it? It's a fairground of the most wonderful junk you could imagine.
Why is well-preserved junk so well received by customers? Because they feel that things from the market are things they belonged to them in another life.
Seriously though the market is an extensive affair, stretched out across both sides of suburban streets, and staked out by vendor's tents. Do you want old postcards and trinkets. Wander this way. What about wrought iron and wood furniture? Puppies? You want'em we have'em. There's even a gentleman who sells old records while blasting mambo from an unseen source.
The most important thing about how a economically weak country makes people so ingenious is that material goods are exploited to the maximum. Where material products are looked at as individuals, as completely interesting objects, they increase in aesthetic value. For a certain car part to reach Tristan Narvaja, someone would have had to salvage it from a wrecked car. Some way or another, all sorts of strange objects reach the market. If these objects could talk, what tales they'd have.
I've seen vendors with collections of old bottles, their labels long torn off, and the strangely-shaped bottles now clean and shiny. A blue Arizona iced tea bottle with the recessed finger indentations looks naked (and beautiful?) once it has reached the market. I don't see Arizona iced tea in the supermarket. How on earth did it cross the earth? Or you can pick up those old Grolsch bottles with the ceramic tops and the rubber seals to use for your oil and vinegar. Pick up an old katana from the fellow over there. Doesn't it make you feel better when you can buy something that already has faced its share of opponents? I'm pretty sure I saw a lighthouse bulb there, too.
Of course, the scope of T.N. really is appreciated when you find things that you find only here. The vendors here dedicate each Sunday at the market because they know that if enough people pass by, they will find at least one person who happens to need the exact shade of lampshade they happen to be selling. It's a strange world that sets up once a week in the Cordon to display all the things you probably don't need.
