Bargaining chips.

Today's been a pretty shitty experience. I'm not interested on writing anything too deep or divine today. So , I'll just tell you how my collection of camouflage uniforms got yet another much sought-after article.

We had heard of a small shop located in the nearby blocks surrounding the railway-station in this city. This particulat shop was supposed to be selling all sorts of military/army/out-doors etc. surplus products and so on. Naturally my eyes gleamed with greed upon hearing this. Naturally I also assumed that they wouldn't be willing to take too high prices of the items they were selling down there.

We went to the shop at around 16:42 PM (local time) and saw these small racks of camouflage clothing outside the shop. It featured all sorts of clothing articles , although many of them were laying there with these really rediculous price-tags attached to them. And by rediculous , I mean they were way too over-priced. We browsed around the racks for awhile and found something of interest in the form of a camouflaged jacket , as you can see over there in that picture.

So the shopkeeper turned up and he spoke French. In broken Swedish and English he told us to come inside his shop and take a better look at his products. We did that since we still needed matching trousers in the same pattern as the jacket was in. Inside the shop there was indeed quite a collection of various military equipment located in boxes , racks and tables. I was in freakin' Nirvana until we started looking at the price-tags that had amazingly high prices. I laughed out loud of the various stuff that this funny little French guy thought he could sell us for nothing at all. Unfortunately most of the trousers in the French "CCE" - pattern were quite small , but I took the biggest ones I could find from the small table. I knew that the trousers would do for now , but in a few months time they would undoubtebly be way too little for me. Luckily I know of a shop that sells the right sized ones in the internet for around 8.50 in English pounds (so it's not too steep).

Then the shop-keeper came to us again and suggested that we go upstairs to the second floor where we was supposedly supposed to have more military clothing articles. Purely out of interest we ventured upstairs and found a medium-sized room with mostly European and Swedish military clothing. It seemed that this guy really wanted to rob us from our last pennies , but luckily I was not interested in anything else he had to sell for us. There was even a really badly worn M-65 - styled jacket there with a camouflage pattern on it.. And this guy wanted 800 crowns for it.

So we went downstairs and I noticed these various Swedish military clothing articles hanging on various racks. There was a green "hold-all bag" for leave hanging in there.. And this French dude had the guts to ask 300 crowns for it when I had bought one for 20 a year ago ! I almost started to laugh.

As we were paying for the French BDU the guy started talking to me in English. He looked at me for a while and told me that he had sold over twelve of these "CCE" - sets during this week for various people. He told me that it was a very popular clothing article. And that it probably was , since the closest place I knew one could get a hold of this stuff was in England.

Then he had a look at me and suddenly blurted out , "say , are you one of those airsoft-people ?"

I nodded and told him I was. I also asked him how he had reached such an exact conclusion. He started to smile at me and made funny notions with his hands while telling me "I could tell that by look at your body and your overall image". I wasn't too comfortable of his words , but I just nodded and he gave me my BDU. We left the shop shortly afterwards and vowed never to come back again since the shopkeeper told us that he wasn't going to receive another patch of the French CCE - sets anymore.

Anyway , let's talk about the camouflage pattern you can see in this picture. It's a French army "CCE" - patterned BDU. The name "CCE" stands for "camouflagé centré Europé" which basically means "Central-European camouflage". Thus it's been designed for the Central parts of Europe.

Now this thing started to replace the old olive green fatigues in the whole of French armed forces at around 1992. So , it's a fairly new pattern overall.


Anyway , that was it.. Now I'll have to go since I have a relationship to save , thank you.