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My Typical Market Day in Paris

The refrigerator in our Paris apartment is smaller than the one in my dorm room in college was, and at least that one made ice. Our apartment is also smaller in size than an average painting in the Louvre, a whopping 24 square meters, and that includes the “mezzanine bedroom” (read: you climb up a creaky ladder to get to 3 foot high crawl space created with a plywood board 5 feet by 4 feet perched on top of the bathroom). Therefore, I am forced to hunt for food every other day, and I am constantly fighting moisture in the bedroom, but lets save that one for later.  I want to tell you about the more chic and glamorous parts of life in Paris.

On rue de Belleville, Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays, there is a wonderful open-air (even when its snowing) market. If I miss that one, on the alternate days, there is one two blocks up on Telegraphe and another down two blocks on Jordain. I detest sterile grocery stores and do all my shopping here, and why not? There is everything from freshly knocked off roosters to knock-off fashion sweaters.

I am still a novice at the language as I have said, so ordering stuff in grams is just beyond me and it involves numbers higher than ten, so I stick to the kilos. First, I get a kilo of fresh spinach that still has the dirt on it from being picked hours ago (which I will spend the rest of my day trying to get off which is okay because for once, I just happen to have time to lovingly hand-wash my ruffage).  Tangerines are in season, my favorite, so I get a kilo of those. Then I ‘acheter’ a kilo of Girolles (chanterelles) mushrooms from the – dirtier than the spinach – guy who has a crush on me or just wants to get rid of his shrooms and always gives me at least twice as much.  I spy a vendor selling nuts, so I ‘prendre’ a kilo of pistachios (more on that at a later date because they multiply and we ate pistachio dishes for weeks; could NOT get rid of them!)  In five minutes flat, I have almost spent my entire WEEKLY budget and my fingers are beet-red from holding these overloaded plastic finger-amputating bags, and I think that I would love to get beets, but they are too heavy, plus we need some meat to eat.

All of the butchers have their meat carts set up at the market with slabs of ‘animal protein’ hanging behind them, wearing not-so-fresh-any-more red and white striped aprons, welding big knives and bantering with customers. I have no idea what they are saying, I just know I need to get one of those old lady trolley shopping carts with the all-terrain wheels because my fingers are about to bleed. So, I choose the meat stand with the least amount of clients so that I do not have to stand in line. Oddly, this one has no patrons at the moment, and that should have been my first clue. So I belly up to the glass makeshift counter and point at some steaks, and say my usual ‘un kilo si-vous plait’. The butcher wants to chitchat; he is going on and on and on. I keep nodding my head up and down yes like a geisha girl – oui, oui, I say (thinking oh, God, I don’t know what I am agreeing too, just give me the steaks so that I can get home and bandage my fingers).

The conversation goes like this:

Butcher : “blah blah, blah, America, blah, blah, blah”

Me : “Oui, je suis américaine!” (thinking, either he has recognized my Woody Allen accent or he really has American steaks. I am missing steaks from back home. These French cows are just not as good as my old ranch steaks in Idaho.)

Butcher : “”blah blah, blah, Canada, blah, blah, blah”

Me : “Hey, oh, Canada is not America, buddy”. (Thinking: these French just lump us all together with Mexico and Canada and sometimes South America as well. My advisor for my “integration” into France asked if I was from Brazil when I told him that I was American. To them, America is anything on the continent with America in the title.)

So I finally get out of there after paying an arm and a leg for my imported meat, and begin my walk home (about a kilometer, but it feels like my car broke down and I am carrying my groceries, a small child and a spare tire ten miles in the raging snow and I know that there is an apartment building waiting for me, with no elevator and we live on the top floor.) About half way home, mid-stride, busting myself up for spending all of our money at the market, I realize: that butcher kept pointing to a picture of a prairie somewhere in Canada.  With a big scraggly-furred animal in the foreground.  A buffalo.  I just bought buffalo steaks! BISON. Oh, geez, I really need to learn French, I thought, as I began humming ‘Buffalo Soldier…he was a buffalo soldier… woy yoy yoy, woy yoy-yoy yoy   win the war for America ….woy yoy yoy, woy yoy-yoy yoy’ …no longer feeling my throbbing digits.