FLEA MARKET AGAIN
Saturday we walked at 9 around the Montmartre and ate an expensive breakfast of bacon and eggs, croissant, half a baguette with jam and coffee and orange juice. When I arrived in Paris I was thinking longterm and bought my groceries at Carrfour and ate as cheaply as I could. But now with Susie here and with only a week to go, I am thinking short term and enjoying every meal, disregarding cost. Lunch yesterday at the flea market was a huge bowl of French onion soup with croutons and cheese crusted on top which I ate half of and Susie ate the other half, at 12 euroes still not expensive. And at night we tried the Cambodian/Vietnamese restaurant right below us where we have been looking down from our window at people eating outside and the food was delicious, this time 12 euroes for a large bowl of noodles and salad and a tasty sauce with three kinds of meat. Well worth it.
We are really enjoying Paris. And on Saturday we delighted in the flea market again, this time visiting a second time what we didn‘t visit the first. In this new area there were two kinds of shops. Elegant high end shops with expensive but almost pretentious furnishings where bored shop owners, glancing idly at their cell phones, waited for the few well dressed people walking through endless aisles of shops to show interest. There were 100 or so of these brightly lit shops competing with each other and I couldn‘t imagine store owners making more than a couple of very expensive sales a day.
Just outside the gates of this enclosed and covered area were street vendors, often Africans, selling everything under the sun in piled up cartons or cluttered shops. There were also a number of small outdoor cafes. Here is where we bought a few things and had fun doing it: a house number, a beatle floating in clear resin, old Catholic missals in French and other small things that will fit into a carry on bag. Photography takes no carry on space so I am bringing back as much of the flea market as I can in photographs which, after we came back to our apartment at 3, it took me the rest of the day until almost midnight to process and to post.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 