Christmas markets

One more post before I leave London for the holidays. I've been immensely enjoying the market culture here. Every weekend, and sometimes during the week too, there are open-air markets. Food markets, flower markets, any-variety-of-goods markets. Streets are blocked off for them. Covered courtyards are home to them. At the Greenwich market, buskers play classical music. At Covent Garden opera singers appropriate a staircase and sing to one another. At a flower market in Hackney a young adolescent auditions "Two for a fiver" in his boyish tenor, anticipating the day he'll have his father's baritone. In the East Ham market I couldn't even understand what a Cockney barker was saying.

The Portobello Road market is intimate and eccentric, Camden Town is punk, Greenwich and Spitalfields are tony, while sprawling through the streets near Spitalfields is a very cheap and somewhat down-at-the-heels market that, except for the skin color of almost everyone there, could have been in Istanbul. And there are surely dozens of markets I haven't seen yet.

Last weekend I went to Camden Town, where four or five markets shoulder their way into one another. Camden High Street/Chalk Farm Road connects them all (street names here change every few blocks), and while it's not a pedestrian throughway, you wouldn't know it at first glance. Pity the driver who needs to pass through on a weekend day, or anytime right before Christmas. The storefronts could be on the Midway at the State Fair. Rough and sometimes gloriously grotesque sculpted pieces give it all a fantastical dreamlike aspect. Heavily pierced men and women in leather or Goth black, many with high pointed Mohawks--think the Statue of Liberty on a 3-day binge--stand on the sidewalk looking like street prophets warning that the end of the world is near. Their signs point you to tattoo and piercing parlors with names like Dark Angel, Metallic Militia, and Chrome.

This is not the part of town you go to if you're thinking Starbucks (though sadly you could probably find one there). Minneapolis by comparison, with its sterile glass skyways, feels like a laboratory in a research hospital.

I do look forward to going home to see friends and family, but the vibrancy of this city--exhausting though it can be--is magnetic.