Turkish Horse

A week or so ago, I was talked into going to the Turkish Horse shop with/by the wife. The Turkish Horse shop is the place where you can go and rummage through bins full of clothes to maybe find something you might consider wearing on an especially dark day in a particularly deserted part of Spitzbergen in December. These clothes (it is said) come from England, and apparently this gives them a special cachet or je ne sais quois (it is perhaps indicative of something that the only two words/phrases I could think of to use there were French and not English at all. It certainly ought to indicate that England would not be the place one would commonly go to to find stylish clothes). I may have mentioned this place before, and its intriguing business model, based I suspect on flogging off clothes donated to charity by unsuspecting people in the UK.

[I should perhaps at this juncture mention that the shop is not actually called a Turkish Horse shop, this is just me being "amusingly" daddish and perverting the Hungarian word turkáló, which is what these shops are actually called. (I think it means "rummage" or something really)]

Anyway, we went on a Monday morning and the place was packed, as that is the day of the new and exciting stock. It was a very strange experience. Mostly because people obviously take it so seriously (I've heard people when asked what their hobbies are, answer "Turkálózni" - or "Turkish Horseplay" as I would like to translate it). This seriousness is manifested by the fact that this is a shop, packed full of people, the vast majority of whom are women, and there is no talking. At all. Not a murmur, not a little side chat, not a pair of friends talking about the weekend. Nothing. It's really really disturbing. The pair of us were quite out of place actually discussing things and chatting and laughing and we got some fairly hostile glances thrown our way.

Anyway, we managed to actually get a few nice things for the family, plus I got to experience a side of local culture which I hadn't previously experienced, so it was all good, really. Can't see it becoming my hobby, though.