A surprisingly legit-ish vintage market!

I never saw myself as a 'vintage' type of person. I normally associate it with pretentious hipsters who aren't quite 'normal'

Well, after yesterday's excursion... my views didn't change at all.

But it was still a fun day.

You see, we went to a vintage market here in Shanghai. I was pleasantly surprised that it was surprisingly large while also being stuffed to the brim of mostly non-Chinese stuff. I saw a lot of Switzerland-based junk among other places, notably the US.

I couldn't help but immediately feel ancient, as much of the 'vintage' antiques were from my generation, from little plastic trolls with that colourful wispy hair, to old 90's rock band tapes and CD's.

Granted, I found some coins going at least as far back as the 60's, and plenty of dusty books and other junk from the 70's, but still. Old.

Normally I associate 'vintage markets' with allergy-inducing, dusty-ass clothing, but this place had so much more. I'd say a good half of it was, I guess, Faux-vintage. I saw an old-looking Dark Side of the Moon vinyl, only to find it was a 2016 remaster. Other stuff was straight up just selling new t-shirts with pictures of old bands on them. Not sure that counts.

But being half legit is pretty good going for China!

Here's some of the garbage - and it was mostly garbage - they had going on sale. So much of it was a spitting image of some of the trash I held precious as a kid which has since been long lost to time and moving around:

I used to think I was so unique as a chld with my roaring lion ring and chain-link necklace. Now I see i was just a hipster in training.

I think I was heavily influenced by my grandfather as a child, I remember having a flask much like the green one in the middle of the collection here, and my grandfather had the shovel on the right, some old binoculars and all sorts from WW2. These ones were all from Switzerland specifically, but swiss-made stuff was and still is remarkably common in the British zeitgeist.

In fact, having this stuff got me so into army type stuff that I even joined the Army Cadets as a young teen. Ironed my own uniform and everything.

These old hi-fi systems take me back. I used to love understanding nothing but the play and rewind buttons. The uncomfortable clicking and waiting for tapes to reset, the random EQ sliders that seemed to make no worthwhile difference, various knobs with missing parts. Great times. The joy of the genuine touch of buttons and switches is something lost on the young'uns these days. I can't say anything scientific off the top of my head, but I feel convinced on some level that the loss of buttons in place of touch screens is taking something away from our brains, our sense of coordination or something. It certainly doesn't feel natural to my old man brain.

And it's not like I don't get it. I have a smart phone lol. I just find the frustration of touch screens far more frustrating than the frustration of buttons and switches. On the flip side, there's far less satisfaction pressing a screen with, at best, a little vibration, compared to actually turning a smooth or clicky dial with real weight behind it.

Ok, rant over. Seems dumb but it feels like it's important on some level.

Towards the end, there was an auction!

My wife paid unreasonable amounts to win some more garbage; an old broken japanese clock, and a coffee pot:

Realistically you could proabably find this stuff for about $5 combined online, but hey ho. Not even rich enough to launder dirty money, bah.

Personally, I bought nothing but a couple of souvenir gifts for family.

So yeah, I guess I do enjoy a vintage market. It reminds me at every corner just how cool things used to be, how unique and adventurous products used to attempt to be, isntead of this sterile, white, sleek aesthetic the world is diseased with now.

A bittersweet day in that regard, I suppose!

PS: I couldn't forget to mention the Capitalist-communist red army Ronald McDonald: