Flea Market Fail

So, to explain my absence for the past month and a half: several days following my previous post, I headed across the pond with the fam for our annual visit to see family and friends. Every year at this time, I tell myself that I'll post at least once a week, but sadly, that never seems to happen. This year, I don't have that great of an excuse, as we haven't done as much traveling to several states as we normally do. However, I simply haven't been taking photos or doing anything terribly blog-worthy (watching back-to-back episodes of "The Millionaire Matchmaker" and making Sonic runs for Cherry Lime-Ades don't count, do they?). So I'm retro-ing it a bit with this previously-promised Fail account. Here goes...

A couple of months ago in Germany, The Husband and I had a free Saturday (The Girl away managing girls' soccer and The Boy without a baseball game). It just so happened to be the right Saturday of the month to head down to the Homburg Flea Market, a favorite haunt of my blog- and books-buddy Eurolush. It's just far enough away from our town for us not to have visited already, but this seemed like the perfect day.

The town of Homburg is really overtaken by this monthly market, which is really, really huge. We had difficulty finding a place to park, and in fact, our chosen spot resulted in the gift of a little white ticket on our windshield at the end of the day. Yeah, that should give you some idea of how the day went. Here is another clue:

Do you ever see something so very ugly that you go, okay--how could anyone want to buy that? Well, we found plenty of those kinds of things at Homburg. Here is another plum specimen:

Can you believe we didn't buy this? Me neither! But to be fair, there was lots of cool stuff, especially some great French enamelware in several stalls. It was hard to resist, but alas, it was pretty pricey. After several hours of browsing and enjoying the sunshine and a brat or two, we almost left Homburg empty-handed, but at the very last stall I visited, I found this:

No, not the sweetie dog, silly, we already had him--the photo! It's an old photograph of a German boys' school--maybe just one class, I'm not sure--and their stern, bespectacled schoolmaster. I found it charming, and it cost me all of one euro. I fixed the frame a bit, and up this went in our living room. It's simple, and I like it. Maybe I'll do a bit better the next time we venture to Homburg, though, and here's hoping it'll be a ticket-free trip.