Flea Market

In this part of the US, every few miles apart one can find a city. Mountain View is the closest to my campus; some others are Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, Palo Alto, San Jose (pronounced San Ho-say). Yesterday I had gone to the city located to our west, Palo Alto. I planned to visit (along with a friend, Rajkumar) the eastern city of San Jose on this last day of vacation. Specifically, the Flea Market.

Flea Market is the American equivalent of Ranganathan Street bazaar plus Mambalam Station Road market. They sell inexpensive clothes, produce (the noun; not as in �to produce�), footwear, furniture and even cars!

This being a Sunday, the bus service that takes us to Mountain View (it is from here that buses that connect to most places ply) was not available. We decided to cycle, but we found that one of the two cycles (called �bike� here) had a flat tyre. Or so it seemed� But on inflating, the air seemed to stay.

Not fully trusting the tyre, with the air pump in my bag, we set out for Flea Market.

The market is located in a huge square ground, with all the shops arranged in row-column matrix. In the first shop, we saw caps, hats and gloves. There was a hat for a dollar both of us took a fancy for. There was only one such, so I let Rajkumar take it.

We spent a little more than an hour walking around the place. I bought gloves and one pound of groundnuts.

From 6:30 in the evening at the university, Martin Radley (our professor) and our class saw the third installment of Lord of the Rings. We were glued to our seats for the full four hours.