Your obligatory Marketplace tour. You're welcome!

A nurseryman selling trees and shrubs...

What can be more cliché than a busload of Northern European (and three American) tourists getting off a bus (or a half dozen jeeps in our case) and wandering through the endless maze of a marketplace in an small town in the Indian Hill Country? Cliché or not, I love it! And you should too!

Obviously, these are random shots. No system or logic--any more than organizes these markets perhaps?

You have to fiddle with the videos--but they give you a sense of how hectic and dangerous the traffic was

You gotta check out this dog!

Kelly Dodson (of Far Reaches Nursery) mugging in a fish stall. What a treat it is to travel with one's heroes!

I was intensely curious about these cookies (?) with fern imprints...but too chicken to buy one..

The locals were gracious as the enormous foreigners photographed them (we did ask permission--usually)_Of course when I visit Belgium, Netherlands, Germany or Britain (whence my fellow travelers come 

from I want to take pictrures of THEM!

One street was safe from the constant stream of cars...

Two of my fellow travelers couldn't resist buying flowers!

Trash is a problem everywhere! Can't be just all quaint and pretty...

 

What we have lost in terms of personal contact, charm and colorfulness buy succumbing to the slick patina of modernity: what wise person (in their heart of hearts) wouldn't swap every shoppette in our endless strip malls, the vast aisles of pseudo-convenience filled with plastic and plasticized packaged foods and inedible "vegetables" and "fruit" flown in from thousands of miles away for the grundgy (perhaps) intensely personal and hopelessly photogenic markets of supposedly third world countries: we who live in safety sealed "first" world are the losers...no wonder we love to visit real places like this and photograph!