SEVENTH-KILOMETER MARKET, Ukraine, May 16 — Most of the shops here on the airport road outside Odessa are neither buildings nor stalls. They are shipping containers, stacked two high in rows long enough to be called streets, though these are little more than overcrowded alleys.
From their steel gates spills a consumer abundance of inexpensive clothes, shoes and toys, kitchenware, hardware and software, cosmetics, sporting goods and various sundries — virtually everything, in short, in a part of the world that not long ago was used to getting by with virtually nothing.
Jeans for $9. Turkish suits, marginally stylish, for $60. Dior, Chanel and Armani are all a steal, if one harbors no complexes about authenticity. Speaking of complexes, there are no dressing rooms in shipping containers. Modesty, though, is in short supply, unlike anything else here, and men and women strip unabashedly in search of a proper fit.
Good guys and bad guys always seem to be fighting among the shipping containers on the docks in some nameless town, in every superheroic or post-apocalyptic movie and graphic novel there is. What if those shipping containers were also selling stuff? “shirts, shirts for $4! Hey, get your spider stuff off those suspenders! I paid good money for those!”
Some friends of ours out here who have a farm bought a shipping container to use as a barn for the backhoe. It was the cheapest way to get a suitable structure “built”.
Some friends of ours out here who have a farm bought a shipping container to use as a barn for the backhoe. It was the cheapest way to get a suitable structure “built”.