Compras, parte II

The people here like to cluster same kind of shops on the same street. I suppose it's wonderfully handy if you're a local: when the first hardware store doesn't have the kind of tool you're looking for, you just pop in at the next shop. When someone tells you of a new cake shop, "on the confectionery street", you'll have no problem finding it.

The hairdressers' street appears to include nail studios and tattoo artists as well.

For a visitor, however, it can be a nightmare. You're starving and wish to find one single restaurant, but all the street has to offer is barber shops. You've left your toothbrush in the last town and would simply like to clean your teeth for the first time in three days, but there is nothing but wallpaper everywhere. I've been lucky enough to also walk down a toilet bowl street and even a dentist's chair street. Or this - costumes and party deco street. (Parties and dressing up is important in these parts of the world.)

Be different: go for the barefooted Spiderman/Santa Claus costume next time.

And what about my bikini?

Well, I finally stumbled upon my luck, when I had already decided I would not look one street further. I was knackered, disappointed and angry. I had asked at several clothes shops, underwear shops and sports shops, and walked past hundreds of other businesses.

Then one saleswoman called me from a clothing store. It was one of those little shops inside a kind of a small market hall that consisted of just eight shops on both sides of a corridor. "What are you looking for, can I help?" she asked, and resigned, I answered, "You surely don't have bikinis, do you?"

"Of course we do!" she answered briskly. She was there with a friend, both of them in their fifties. The shop was perhaps six square metres and covered from the floor to the ceiling with clothes that looked like they were all about to fall from the shelves. Eagerly, the woman pulled a plastic bag from one of the shelves, and together with the friend, they started emptying its contents onto the counter.

There was a swimming suit and two sets of bikinis. No different colours, different models, not even different sizes. Just those three, take it or leave it. The women lifted the bikini tops to hold them over my chest; that was the amount of trying on there was to do. They concluded that the black one fit me perfectly.

I left the shop with a new black bikini in my bag.

In general, I try as much as possible to avoid posting photos of people without their permission, unless they are in large groups and thus not that intimately portrayed. In this post, however, I felt like it would have been impossible to picture the topic without showing a couple of faces too.