The Brussels Flea Market and Marcel

I spent an hour at a flea market here in Brussels the other day. I spent some of that time going around taking photos of things that were obsolete, but then I got bored because, well, everything was obsolete. Not much of a surprise at a flea market, I guess. There were a couple of gems, however: a fax machine guide;a kind of wood thrasher that looked like a torture device; an old rotary phone and a Polaroid camera which seemed to me like two puppies in a window, each hoping to be adopted but not wanting to leave one another. Maybe they were dreaming of the day when cameras and phones would be connected as one.

My favorite discovery, however, was a table that was home to about 5,000 old postcards. I got to talking to Marcel, the man who ran the stall. He’s spent the last 35 years collecting postcards, he said. I asked if he ever read any of them and did that “pfff” things that French-speakers do. When, pushed, however, he said that once he saw a card that was written by a World War I prisoner of war to his mother. “I received the eggs you sent me so that I’d have something to eat this month,” he wrote, “but one arrived broken.”

Makes you kind of hate email, doesn’t it?

For more photos from the flea market, click here.