On a cloudy Sunday afternoon I decided to swing down to Chinatown and check out the markets.
I'd been down there a couple times already, but never with my camera. Well, my phone, but not the big boy. Bringing him out meant things were serious. I mean, lugging around a 5DMKIII is not a simple matter. It's a full backpack of stuff to make sure I have the lenses, batteries and other random stuff ready in case needed. A real pain when the camera on my phone will do almost the same level of quality necessary for most people. Technology is making things a lot simpler, and it's the person behind the camera that matters anyways.
So, here I was, with my camera, standing in front of a crowded Chinatown Shopping Center. People milled about, moving into and out of the entryway. It was a little like a black whole...as you were walking by, if you got in too close, you suddenly found yourself turning and walking down the narrow alleyway walled with shops contains a crazy amount of bric-a-brac, shoes, bags, toys, jewelry, and, well, pretty much anything you could think of.
Los Angeles is an amazing place with so many nooks and crannies to discover and explore. I have to admit I haven't been to near as many as I should have in the time I've lived in LA. I think that's true of many people. That when they live someplace, the likelihood of them really exploring and seeing the sites drops dramatically. It might be the mindset that the thing is always there and that they can check it out sometime in the undefined future...but that leads to you missing out on a lot of stuff. It's a habit I fell into over the last several years. I thought my buddy Joe had cured me of it when we lived in Kyoto, but, guess not.
It definitely reminded me of my trips to China, walking through some of the market streets.
Packed in, crowded, vendors with their hawks eyes pulling people in with simple questions. So much useless crap being pawned off for cheap prices to wandering tourists and needy children mixed with the useful necessities in life.
At points in the narrow alley it felt like the walls were pressing in on you, walls of backpacks arching over to create entryways that you had to crouch down to enter. Kids loved it, adults dealt with it. I thought it was pretty cool.
If you walk far enough in the space opened up into a different kind of market, focused on cloths.
Strings of shirts, skirts, pants and coats were everywhere. Piles of shirts, shoes, bags, and backpacks went on row after row. The blue and green tarps a seeming permanent fixture above casting this weird aquamarine over everything. Everywhere you could hear the chatter of different languages...Chinese, Korean, Japanese, English, German, Spanish, and other languages I couldn't identify, at least without getting rudely close.
I really like these kinds of places. The press of people, things, and the environment reminds me of memories long past in places far away. Our modern markets, at least in the US, are so dull. Soulless structures of steel and brick filled with overpriced goods in designer interiors, the life of what a market should be sucked dry generations ago by simple greed.
There's so much packed into this space that it was hard to capture it all
...well, after a bit it was pretty much the same thing over and over and over again...and I think you can only take so many pictures of giant racks of clothing and discount signs, hehe. I hope you enjoyed this little walkthrough of my walk through the Shopping Center in Chinatown. It's a cool place to spend some time, and if you're so inclined, money. Prices are good, quality isn't bad, and the people are pretty friendly. And, afterwards, you can head to any of a dozen nearby restaurants to eat some amazing food. Definitely worth a trip if you're in town.
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