El Residente
20 A Day in the Life by Allen Dickinson
Street Vendors
T
here’s a big difference between where I used to live in Santa Ana and where I live now, in Ciudad Colón. Here, every day there are vendors coming by the house selling something – from small drinking glasses, to children’s coloring books, to homemade pastries or candy, to household items like clothes pins or cleaning brushes. There’s too much to list, but hardly a day goes by without someone calling “Upe!” from the gate. Today is a good example; there have been three peddlers by here just this morning. In Santa Ana the only ones that ever knocked on my door were evangelists wanting to save my well-used and threadbare soul. (Well, that’s not exactly right, there was one guy that came regularly with excellent ceviche, but I knew him from somewhere else first.)
Generally, each vendor only has one category of item they are selling; one guy has only packages of bread and pastries, another has nothing but coloring books, a third is limited to plastic trash bags. The only two exceptions are the guy that comes by with a pickup truckload of day-old fruits and vegetables (not always pretty but edible – and cheap), and the guy with a freezer truck filled with pints of ice cream and popsicles. There was a lady who stopped by a few days ago that was selling individual BIC pens for 100 colones each, three for 200. Then there’s the kid selling a suite of homemade cleaning products packaged in re-purposed soft drink bottles. (BTW, they work quite well!) Something that’s interesting to me is that most of the items being peddled cost the vendor (maybe) three
