Markets good and bad

Despite the heatwave expected for Sydney last weekend, GF and I went through with doing our market stall at Ramsgate on Saturday. Luckily we were cooled down with a little rain early in the morning.

We had a lovely day and made a reasonable profit which made GF happy, but for me the highlight was seeing a shopper wearing a pendant she previously bought from me.

I wish I had taken a photo of the pendant. It was definitely one-of-a-kind. I made it from a vintage Czechoslovakian stamp that had a Praha (Prague) postmark perfectly centred across the middle.  The black postmark and the plain black necklace set off the red-and-white stamp really well.

So Saturday was good, Sunday not so much. We got up at 4am and drove to Maitland to do their busiest market day of the year. When we arrived, we found the longest queue of cars/trucks/vans ever! And when we finally got to the gate, we found out that they had booked someone else into our regular site. Hang on a minute - I prebooked and prepaid for that site three months ago!

Not only did we not get our regular spot, we didn't get any spot at all! And this didn't happen to just us. We waited almost an hour in a queue of other stallholders who had been bumped out of their spots, to find out where else the organiser could put us.

In the end, the organiser told us to go to our usual spot. I don't know why she did, when she had already told us they had put someone else there. But we weren't the only bumped stallholders she had to deal with, so I think it was just to get rid of us.

We drove to our usual spot and you guessed it, a stallholder was already set up there. Obviously we could not expect them to move. After all, they had paid their money (as we had) and had been booked into that spot (as we had) so it was not their problem.

It was clear from looking around us that there was a huge number of extra stallholders there that day, all spots were already filled up, and other stallholders were still trying to drive in through the crowds. We made our way back to the front gate but it was clear that the organiser had bigger problems than just us. 

It was a looooong drive back to Sydney.