Fantastic Blognanza!

Hi… I have this account a while already, but Shirtspotting, everyday life and a long holiday kept me from posting here earlier.

However, as first post I’d like to share some holiday pics with you. My girlfriend and me travelled to Spain and I was thrilled to see so many things there. Our first stop was Madrid. Arriving just on that unlucky day that the SpanAir plane crashed and so many people were killed. However, on arriving at the airport we didn’t get any of this and just heard it in the news later that day.

Beside this sad news we fully enjoyed our time in Madrid. To get back to T-shirts (sometimes this limitation is a bit annoying…), I first realized Spaniards are chic. Really. And they do love shopping. Yeah, everyone does, but I have never seen such a rate of shoe shops per street. And you spot more cool T-shirts worn by friendly people than you do here in Germany.

An absolute must-see is the sunday flea market in a quarter called “El Rastro“. But “the Rastro” has become the synonym for Spain’s most famous flea market. God, I love flea markets anyway, and this one was particularly rich in good finds. There are no private vendors that try to make a few cents out of their old household, just professional sellers. Hundereds of vendors offer their stuff, mainly clothes, shoes, souvenirs and art, and pretty much all of it is a good deal. I started taking pics of the T-shirt stands but after a while decided that it’s enough. This says already pretty much about just how many of them there were. Being that many the T-shirt stands have specialized: some sell fun shirts, others city shirts like in the souvenir shops, there were stands of Metal band merchandise, rock band shirts, design shirts … the latter sold some designs that I knew and were obviously ripped off from Threadless and DBH. I was also a bit surprised to see Tokio Hotel is a popular band in Spain.

With a limited budget for a 16 day trip I had to pull myself together and not start spending like I’d have loved to. At the very last stand I cracked. I mean, you can’t walk past shirts for just 2€, can you. So I bought a nicely drawn shirt of ropes, cats and strange creatures. Even though I expect it to fall apart after a few washes, it has survived until now. I still wonder how they can afford it to sell at that price. It was made in the world’s poorest country, Bangladesh, and I really hope some poor fucker can live from manufacturing these. However, a holiday is not always the best time for ethic dilemmas anyway.

You can see a series of more pics here.