Wednesday 10.14.2010



Birds and Boars and Bulls, Oh My!

It’s market day in Arles, at least one of the market days. Today's is on Square Lamartine about a half hour walk from our house. The plan is to walk there, find a pastry vendor for breakfast on the fly and then check out all the stuff.


It’s a nice morning again and we walk most of the way along the river where it seems a little brisk without jackets. The Wednesday market is the smaller of the Arles two-a-week extravaganzas, but it seems plenty big to us as it extends for at least a half-mile on the streets adjacent to the square.

Entering through the river end, our first encounter is with dozens of leather goods vendors with purses, belts, bags and shoes. They quickly give way to the food folks. The produce vendors seem to be spread throughout the entire market, but the rest of the food is pretty well grouped by category. First are the fish stalls with every imaginable sea creature known to be edible. They are supplemented by others with massive wok shaped cauldrons of paella, bouillabaisse, stews and one-pot dishes. John samples a salad with tentacled creatures and vegetables and it is delicious. Just the right lead-in to a French pastry. Pat finds a couple bananas and Chassons du Pomme while John picks up olives for later.

One of our goals is to find sausages, cheese and fancy bread for a rustic supper tonight. That changes as we move into a number of stalls with chickens roasting on rotisseries and the juices dropping down onto pans of potatoes below. Oh Baby! We walk the rest of the market while we consider our options for later. The food eventually gives way to clothes, kitchen tools and assorted odds and ends.


Here’s the new plan. We’re getting a chicken with scoops of those potatoes, a bunch of perfectly ripe tomatoes and a baguette for dinner and some huge slices of bread and more tomatoes to make sandwiches for lunch. We add “un petite” slice of wonderful cheese to fill in where necessary. The whole thing is about 15 euros for two meals for the 3 of us.

It is now 11:00 and the market is bustling. We previously mentioned the diversity of southern France but you can see it clearly here. The shouts of the vendors and the orders from the customers are in various dialects and languages, people pulling and pushing and greeting with kiss-kiss-kiss and costumes from around the world all set a scene worthy of a Hollywood blockbuster.


We find some new streets to get us home for lunch where we add a can of tuna, a glob of mayo, a hard-boiled egg and some chips to our new purchases for a great meal. This afternoon is the Camargue, a wilderness area just to the southwest of Arles which is unique to France. While we are getting in the car, Mary announces that she is skipping this segment as the latest to fall to the dreaded vacation food disease.


John and Pat use their wiles rather than GPS babe MMD to get started and are promptly lost within five minutes. Quickly realizing their mistake they whip a U-turn and are back in action. The Camargue is an area of wetlands, swamps, lagoons and brackish backwater that extends most of the way to the Mediterranean. It is the winter home of millions of waterfowl from the northern countries as well as the nesting area for thousands of flamingoes. The birds are joined by land creatures like wild boar, wild bulls and allegedly, wild white horses.


We see flamingoes early on and then find a gated (but unlocked) dirt maintenance road that extends along a shallow but wide river/canal. We hike down the road for a few minutes, look to our right and there posing for us is a wild boar. He wasn’t very big or threatening so we get a bit closer before he does a slow amble in the opposite direction. We consider the possibility that he is going to get Dad and decide we shouldn’t pursue. A bit farther we again look into the brush and there are three massive wild black bulls grazing on skimpy grasses. No white horses but pretty good for a couple of city-folk.


Traveling farther by car we reach a series of dikes extending into the lagoons and south to the sea. Again we park, have a close encounter with a lone flamingo near us and see hundreds more out in the water. We probably don’t have the same appreciation that others would have for this type of environment, but we enjoy our afternoon. We reward ourselves with a beer on a bar patio in tiny Salin-de-Giraud before heading back. It’s 5:00 when we get to the house and Mary claims to be fully recovered. A peaceful afternoon for her was just what the doctor ordered.

We have some cocktails, put the chicken, potatoes and all the lovely juices into a pot which then goes into the oven. We're noisy ugly Americans eating with our hands, arguing and generally enjoying our "home cooked" meal. It was all delicious.


Somehow it is 11:00, we review plans for tomorrow and get to bed.


Today's weather: Sunny and hazy, slow 60, high 79.