• It was a crisp, bustling marketplace swamped with the shrill, optimistic voices of salesmen and colossal, grunting livestock. Yet amongst all this sound and body everyone else in the square moved as though time was a separate entity for them, shuffling through the falling snow like living snowploughs, black and white faces bowed to the nagging wind, with black and white shawls and scarves rapped tightly around any visible patch of snow white skin.

    On the other hand for us nomad’s life is an adventure, filled with vibrant color and much freedom with new sights, sounds and smells everyday; even on a cold day like this right now the world is still our canvas.

    My father and I set up our small, rigid wooden stall, apart from the street clot of other merchants, inside the isolated part of the city, where the skinny pigeons flock in numbers, despite the risk of being shot by hungry beggars, to be given a free meal of molding bread crumbs by the people throwing these scraps out of their kitchen windows. Where the streets become narrower so in order to get a heavy cart, laden with goods, through you would be forced to drive it slowly, past the cramped, smelly houses that reek of soot and other smells, hoping all the while you were not attracting too much attention. Where small scrappy little kids, with mud smeared on their once rosy cheeks, can be seen smashing heavy stones over red eyed rats, which squeak and squirm and nibble under their rough grasp. You may be thinking at this point why on earth would you set up your lively hood in such a place?, but for one thing the cities are the best places to sell things as people are richer here and more interested in any old junk, you can make with your bare hands that they can shove uninterested the next minute onto their dusty mantelpieces, than people in the country, who are too busy struggling to make ends meet, and provide a good harvest for the whole country! However apart from that the real reason why we like sell things in a quiet space is because I am a perfectionist I just have to fiddle with the arranging and make our ornaments as interesting as possible after all its my duty to sell the items, it is my fathers duty to carve them from logs of wood, and I tell you now it is the most difficult thing in the world to arrange your work nicely when there are a dozen or so snout faced upper class men, shoving their over sized noses in your flustered face like pigs in a trough.

    Unfortunately despite my perfect arranging, that I might add takes a lot of skill and concentration to achieve, our rusty money box would still be nothing to grin proudly about at the end of the day, and waggle it to and fro under unsuspecting passerby’s red noses. Usually all we find at the most are three rusting copper pennies at the very bottom staring up at us like a room filled with, rusty tired old men and women in the workhouse.