vexorian Posted March 1, 2010 Posted March 1, 2010 First of all an introduction, it is probably not obvious but I am a just out of dark age AFOL that lives/was born in La Paz, Bolivia. That pretty much makes me forced to resign to buying new sets from some few toy stores that care about it (this is seriously playmobil's territory) and of them, even the most honest one gives me at least 1.3 times the retail price due to all the import costs and taxes, you know. Even so, it is pretty hard to find older sets and new sets come once in a year - if they come - . So I was jealous when reading threads in this forum and others about great deals in garage sales, garage sales are really not common at all in here and I am yet to find evidence that one has ever happened. But there is something about this. Just upwards this city there is another one called "El Alto", something odd happens on Sundays and Thursdays, suddenly most of that city turns into a marketplace. I have forever heard rumors of how you can find "anything" used, new or refurbished at insane small prices... But I never really put a lot of attention to it until some friend actually told me that there was a person selling technic/bionicle pieces by unit in the "El Alto" fair ... So I just went today. The problem is that the fair is excessively big and it is very easy to get lost so I couldn't find this person, or maybe I did but the rain did not allow me to notice. But I did find some other kiosks: 1. My father (this fair is not something that you go alone to) noticed this one because he saw giant bags of bricks, but when I checked, the bags were full of clones and other garbage. Yet by luck I noticed that the woman also had the following things: Yep , it was 99% of 7128 and 50% of 6572. But back then I didn't really know which set numbers or what exactly it was, i just cared about how I finally had a chance to had a yellow skinned Luke skywalker and two troopers with all and speeders... So I asked. Apparently you were supposed to buy the whole thing, including that sail vehicle but the price was... about 6.3 USD. So, I actually bought it, it seemed like they had more pieces than you could find for any other thing I could buy this year for 6.3 USD in stores, and I really wanted that luke skywalker... Plus the instructions were included! Close inspection, there were 'surprises' As you can see there are anomalies with one of the speeders: Well, the missing pieces are not uncommon and I think the only one I do not really have is the second trooper backpack. Some of the plant pieces had some missing leafs, one had no leaves at all. The extreme guy and his sail vehicle were something I didn't really consider while buying but now that I can take a good look I am happy. It turns out the "boat" has ... trans (yellow?) technic wheels! That's nice. But I also took a second look to the extreme guy minifig: Don't underestimate extreme guys, you never know when one of them is a ninja in disguise... Seems someone replaced the missing head with a ninja one, that's nice because we used to have ninja figs but now that head was gone. I love the rest of the fig, that helmet and that black visor sound like would be very nice for a space fig after adding a gas tank... Anyway, I kept going and many places started to pop up in which there were bag after bag of bricks. The bags held quite a mixture of bricks and it was very hard to tell all what was inside. But it was also easy to tell that there were plenty of megabloks and other clone brands inside the bags as well. After seeing so many of those in many different places (do notice that a) it was raining and b) These 'places' were outposts improvised on the floor of what was supposed to be the car area of a street). And I decided to buy one of them. The price for that bag size was about 3 USD.I made sure to pick one that at least seemed to have a good amount of interesting bricks. I picked one that had some few technic pieces in a visible spot. When I came home, I sorted the bag, and found a lot of LEGO bricks of so many types, there were free style, life on mars and some bionicle (Is that fenrak's head?)... But of course, the bag came with a lot of other brands, this one actually came with tons of megabloks, which is strange considering how I am yet to see a megabloks box in my hole life... Here you can see the bag and all the megabloks it had inside after I filtered out the LEGO bricks... it also had some few pieces of other clone brands: Well, I continued my journey and found a place in which they were selling completely built Bionicle canister sets (minus the canister and instructions and some had some missing pieces or replaced pieces) for 1.4 dollars each, I bought me five, including a white bohrok and a green rahkshi, two toa metru and a green vahki, well those guys did not have krata/krana and the rahkshi had metru foot instead of rahkshi foot, but otherwise it was fine. I triple checked the pieces to make sure they weren't "invincibility robot" chinese clones (for that price, it is hard not to be suspicious), but it turns out they weren't... Notice how before this date the only way to get those was to pay 10 USD or more at my toy store, and I just wanted to have many varied pieces for MoCs... It was fun. I am seriously considering to go and just buy all the brick bags I can find...
frogstudio Posted March 1, 2010 Posted March 1, 2010 I totally understand you. Living in Argentina, I also get to pay up to 3 times the retail value for sets (though, I must admit that, except for the huge sets) we get new sets fairly quickly. Nice find, congrats and enjoy!!!!
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