Yesterday was a full day. We drove all over Provence, visiting Alphonse Daudet’s windmill, Arles, and Les Baux along the way. Now we’re back in Aix. It’s market day in Aix-en-Provence, so it’s the perfect day to stay in town and take it easy.
The breakfast room in our hotel has a nice assortment of breakfast goodies – croissants, breads, rolls, pain au chocolat, cereals, fruit, cold cuts, cheese, and yogurt. Pain au chocolat is a chocolate-filled pastry. It’s practically a breakfast staple here.
Pain au chocolat is the French Breakfast of Champions. Who else but the French would have chocolate-filled pastries for breakfast? Me, today. Mmmmm.
The BBC International Channel
Back in the room, we turned on TV. Was there anything important going on in the world that we were missing? Sometimes it’s better not to know, but oh well.
If it’s available, we like to tune into the BBC International channel. It’s more entertaining than the news at home, but they do seem to be slightly obsessed with wildfires in far-off California…
1st Announcer — “In the U.S., wildfires continue to rage out of control in California with no end in sight.”
2nd Announcer — “I say, why would any sane person build a home there? If the fires don’t get you, the earthquakes will.”
1st Announcer — “Well, I’d say they’re certainly having second thoughts now, what?”
2nd Announcer — “They’re positively daft!”
1st Announcer — “Indeed. And now let’s go over to Chip for the latest in sports, including an update on the football riots in Gloucester….”
Time to turn off the TV and get a move on. When we stepped out of the hotel, the streets of Aix had been transformed. It was as if a conquering army had moved in during the night and taken over the city. An army had, indeed, taken over the city, but this was an army of vendors.
They started arriving early in the morning, driving up to their predefined spots in miniature vans and trucks of all shapes and sizes. We have “minivans” back home, but these aren’t minivans. These are “miniature” vans. We don’t have anything like ‘em back home. There’s a whole array of miniature vehicles over here that we’ve never seen.
It Happens Like This…
Early in the morning, a vendor will pull up in one of these little vehicles and start unloading his stuff. He’ll have all kinds of collapsible gadgets and gizmos. When everything is out of the little truck, he’ll start unfolding, unfurling, assembling, attaching, expanding, and hooking together all kinds of structures. This will become his place of business for the next five or six hours.
When he’s finished, he has a set-up that’s five times the size of the little truck he arrived in. Multiply this guy by a hundred, and by 8:00 in the morning, there’s a whole new city where just a few hours earlier there were just empty streets.
Aix is the perfect place to have an outdoor market. The weather is nice most of the time, and there are lots of huge trees to provide shade. There’s one particular square that’s the center of most of the action. If you’re a vendor, this is where you want your stall to be.
Vendors who aren’t in the main square set up on one of the streets converging on the square, but they’d be easy to miss unless you’re canvassing the whole place like we’re going to do.
Most of the vendors are farmers who’ve made the trip to town to sell their produce. Everything looks really good. The open-air market in Arles was more like a swap meet, where people were selling everything under the sun. But market day in Aix seems to be mostly about food and flowers.
Everyone’s in a Good Mood on Market Day
Everyone is in a good mood on Market Day. Vendors do their best to sell an extra kilo of apples or another loaf of bread. The spice merchant thinks you need to have some cumin to go with that coriander. If he spoke English, maybe he’d be saying, “cumin get it!” Or perhaps not.
With aromas from all of those flowers, fresh bread, and spices wafting around in the air, the olfactory nerves are almost overwhelmed — too many scents to keep track of, all intermingling at the same time.
But then around mid-morning the problem is solved, because the paella guy starts whipping up his first batch, and the smell of sizzling chorizo sausage takes over. Might have to have an early lunch today.
To be continued…
Credit for the great photo of market day in Aix at the top of this post: The Good Life in France
