Anjuna Market

Wednesday is market day in Anjuna, so we decided to check it out.  We decided to walk and it took us at least half an hour to get there, still not sure if we followed the directions correctly, but we made it.  It's set up in the middle of a huge dirt field that leads up to the edge of Anjuna beach and was considerably larger than I thought.  We walked down the entrance street past all the parked cars and scooters and rikshaws and cabs and immediately the heckling began.  I was first accosted by a twentysomething scamster who somehow managed to convince me that there was something dreadfully wrong with my right ear that needed his immediate attention and to my surprise reached right in there with what looked sort of like a Q-Tip and withdraw a nasty blob of earwax.  He started to go for the other ear and I decided I'd had enough and made my escape. I offered him one rupee for his troubles and then scoffed when he tried to get a hundred.

There's a main drag, so to speak, through the center of the market which roughly splits into two parts.  The main drag is lined with shops and cluttered with sellers, tourists, burnt out hippies, vacant bystanders and the hecklers trying to sell you anything from bongo drums to maps of Goa to random pieces of cloth.  You can take a left or right and go down into one of the alleyways which are thankfully bereft of vehicular traffic but crammed shoulder-to-shoulder with shops.  I remembered from the Mysore market how spice is displayed in pyramid-shaped stacks, brightly colored, cool to look at even if I have no desire to buy them-- which is kinda how I felt about all the stuff there.  Since Goa is so touristy, you'll find an odd and rather uncomfortable stylistic mishmash of Indian and hippie.... There was a number of stalls with t-shirts emblazoned with iconic images of Che Guevera, as well as the ubiqitous Sanskrit OM symbol and even tees that said "Free Tibet".  Naturally there were a ton of stalls selling endless CDs of Goa trance.  As well as a ton of Diesel knock-offs.  Overall it felt a lot like the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul, which I visited this past March, although the heckling was much more persistent in Anjuna.  Still, like in the Grand Bazaar, after a few too many turns and samey-looking booths, I started to totally lose sense of where I was in the maze of shops, it all becomes a blur with no beginning and no end.

There were also a lot of beggars.  One of the first I recalled seeing was a haggard looking mother carrying a small baby in her arms; apparently the small baby has been identified as a potent selling point because I saw quite a few more moms-and-baby pairs walking through the market with outstretched hands.  When I was in Mysore a couple of years ago, I was walking down an otherwise quite suburban street in Gokalum with a friend when this beggar, a tiny little girl who barely made it up to my knee, started bouncing up against my leg demanding money. She kept this up for nearly a block and I was incredibly uncomfortable and wanted her to get the hell off me but she was this tiny little girl, what the hell was I supposed to do?  Scraping away at my Western guilt with surgical precision.  It's impossible to forget when you're in the third world that even your meagre bank account bank home amounts to undreamed of wealth for a lot of the people you encouter.  You can't really escape it.

After an hour or so of the market I could feel my skin overheating in protest.  I'm not accustomed to getting so much sun, and it's rapidly turning me into a sun-baked retard.  I often lose thoughts, I stumble over sentences, I get halfway through saying something and then drift away and I can't do anything quickly anymore.  Totally sweet, I recommend it!

Comments

[Damien]

Ooooo, Shopping! How very exciting. I worked for a dentist that would travel to poorer countries often and give out toothbrushes; from the pictures I saw the children seemed elated. I would be broke the first week, especially if children were coming up to me. What did you do about the knee-high-to-a-june-bug-beggar?

D