The Market

 

Today we went to the market, one of two local street markets.

This one, The Liberation Market, was the largest street market I have ever seen in my life. A military brass band played Christmas and nostalgic old timey songs while an endless array of vendors sold vegetables and fish along a great square and up and down the tramline street.

What was the occasion for this spectacle?

I dunno. 

It was Thursday. There wasn't any.

It happens every day here except Monday, until about one in the afternoon.

In some ways this market was very different than the ones I've been to, I mean besides the size. It didn't dabble in crafts or prepared foods. There weren't really stalls to get snacks or meals, though the city spilling into the market provided plenty of that. There wasn't even much of any kind of prepared food or products. It was almost entirely vegetables, endless presentations of fruit and vegetable, and a prodigious section for fish.

We're near the sea.

I did not know there were so many edible fish. Faced with the dazzlement I briefly considered taking up a new life's work of learning how to prepare all these fish, and eating them all, and then dispensed of the idea, feeling it too large a task for me and also feeling concerned such a thing could crowd out the cheese eating.

I did my best to get a few pictures in a single minute of photography I had after we sat on a bench and ate some of the best Socca in the city, but the images sort of drifted to the local area.

I felt compelled to make the pictures into classic black and white photography, and since it suited the city so well, I spread it out into some of the other pictures I've taken over the last couple of days.

Moved

 

And there it is, we have moved.

We live in France.

We aren't traveling. We aren't on vacation. We won't be returning home. 

I mean, unless we go out, like we did today, until we took the tram back home, at which point we were home. 

Because this is our home.

It'll sink in eventually.

This is home, which is in France. But as we are still putting together our household in our attic apartment in a big city, so we spent the whole day in Ikea. 

Ikea did not feel a lot like France to us. Perhaps it was exactly like Stockholm or something, and maybe it should have reminded us of that, but we've never been to Sweden, and I doubt it's like that anyway. It was more like Bloomington, Minnesota.

It was a lot like Bloomington, Minnesota!

There was a carnival outside the Ikea for no reason I could be sure of, but since there is the soccer stadium across from the Ikea too, it may have had to do with a recent soccer game there, or one upcoming, or both. Oddly, in another echo from our life in Minnesota, the soccer stadium here has the same corporate sponsor and name as the soccer stadium close to where we used to live in Saint Minneapolis. And even stranger, I think they borrowed the stadium design pretty heavily from each other. It made the whole day very disassociative. Though it was probably worth it for all the stuff we got; containters, chairs, glasses, baskets. Almost certainly worth it, particularly if we don't have to go back to the Ikea for a very long time.

Tomorrow we are planning on going to a large daily market we've been wanting to get to for awhile. I think that will feel more like France, but it will probably end like most days around here do: with us lugging heavy bags through the city.

Christmas on the Cote D Azur

 

We love a good Christmas market in my family. 

Although I'm not sure we've been to any. Yes, we have been to dozens upon dozens of Christmas Markets, but how good are they? Nevertheless, though they have a tendency to come up just a bit short, the promise of glittering lights, magical little shopping villages, seasonal treats, and highly personal crafts cannot be denied. So over the years we have increasingly planned the holiday season around these market visits. 

Did the markets live up to our hopes? 

No.  

But the dream and spectacle of the markets was enough to carry us through.

And yet, in the back of our minds was...

Europe!

So we moved here.

And it's Christmas now!

We have been to the Cannes market. Very big. Very pretty. Not the most interesting shopping.

We have been to the Nice market. Quite lovely, even grand. And yet while a bit sprawling it's not as big as it seems, and, here is the rather obvious kicker with most of these because we are in France, they are very very food oriented. This can be mixed for us, although I would like to take a closer look at the Nice Market Champagne Pavilion! But more curious crafts, homey stuff, and Winter shops would be a real treat for us as we set up a new apartment. And then, to add another curious unexpected disappointment, the Nice market is insanely security obsessed. 

My first thought was they must have a reason for sealed entry to the market area through well staffed metal detector gates.

My second thought is: If you can't manage an open Christmas Market with faith in the goodness of humankind, you should just figure the whole Christian experiment has failed so you might as well cash it in. 

Theoule Sur Mer, like tons of the small towns and villages and suburbs (yes suburbs!) along the Cote D Azur, is full of Christmas events, but there doesn't exactly seem to be a market here. The lights are great though, the santons creche show and sale (these are the little xmas figurines) and the music on main street is fantastic. 

And there is still plenty of time for more! We hope to hit up Eze, Monaco, maybe Villefranche Sur Mer and Antibes. Who knows? We are only limited by our ambition as even the minor villages have something going on for Christmas. 

And whether the markets come through with everything we desire or not, these already beautiful places, decked out in some wonderful and thorough Christmas regalia, is a treat on its own. 

In that spirit, I have pulled from my vast catalog of local photos and Christmassed them up a little.

Well, maybe a lot.

But I like Christmas.

My words of wisdom to you

 

Some Theoule Sur Mer farewell pictures. I have some vanilla pictures of these (a curious term considering that I mean by this merely normal realistic images of foxes holding signs), and I like them, but I have become, as is my nature here, so carried away with my text imbued versions that they have superceded the regular ones. 

And so I present these tableaus, and their special messages from Theoule Sur Mer, on our last morning here:

Theoule in images

Though yesterday I ventured one, out of the camera, unaltered photograph from our last days in Theoule Sur Mer, it was hardly representative of, on the one hand, the hundreds of miscellaneous images I have collected over the past couple of months, nor of the complicated beauty of this place as it really is. And so, with that in mind I set forth once again to bring out the variety of possibilities in my images of this tiny slice of the Cote D'Azur. Darling, complicated, puny, exotic, plain Theoule Sur Mer. While most of these images over the next days may appear to be complete fabrications, they are recognizably the places we have been living and walking around in even as they partake of all their fantastical elements.

Last days in Theoule Sur Mer

 

What a little French beach town it is here in Theoule Sur Mer! And if someone had wanted to give us a neat and pretty apartment with a view of the sea I would have gladly settled in to watch old age slowly roll in here. But no one wanted to give us one of those, and it probably worked out for the best. I think we'll do better disappearing into the wilderness of a big city. The tight world of this French Village doesn't quite have all the things one might think of when they imagine living in France.

What does one think of when they imagine living in France?

Champagne bars!

Cheese shops!

Opera Houses!

Matisse Museums!

But yes, also quaint houses with flowers climbing their crumbling walls even in the Winter, and Christmas lights in the street with a village hall packed full of tiny nativity scenes from hundreds of cities across the world.

I'm just saying nowhere is going to have everything.  That is the nature of... everywhere. We picked our pile. I'm nervously looking forward to settling down.

But a couple of more days here is fine. The waves roll in. I'll try to finish eating what I have in the fridge. We go for one more lovely walk on the once confusing now familiar winding streets and paths. I take a few pictures. None of them turn out anywhere near how magic they seem when I take them, but if you want to just see a plain picture today, with nothing added or made more fancy, I can show you that, just so the leaving won't be too sad.

Theoule market

 

We finally made it to the Theoule Sur Mer market! Though we have been living here for approaching two months, we have somehow missed the village market on every single Friday it has taken place! At first ignorance kept us away, and then a comedy of errors conspired to cause us to miss the market each week, first through apartment hunting, then due to the unfortunately timed business of closing on our lease and setting up house, and then through a variety of appointments and health emergencies cropping up at just the wrong time every friday in a mysterious ill-fated clockwork. Even today, we only made it back to the market by waking early in our big city apartment, and then dashing to just in time catch the train back here. 

But finally, finally we made it!

Out in the village square, which is really more of a roundabout than a village square, but whatever, I'm not going to run down dear little Theoule Sur Mer, the market was gloriously gathered. Now keep in mind this is not a big town, and it is Winter, so it is impressive that there was anything there at all, but, the market consisted of three vendors. 

Just three, but that's more than none.

And as for patrons, well, there was us.

So I did my part as well as I could.

There was the vegetable and fruit vendor (good prices on pineapples, but not local). There was an olive man. And there was a fishmonger. As for vegetables, we have a good supply on that at our two places in town so I gave him a pass. I was sad there was no cheesemonger, but really, fish was no small thing. There is nothing in the way of fish to be got in this town so I got a nice hefty salmon steak. There were a few other fishes, notably some extremely crude cross section chunks of something that almost looked like swordfish but I don't think was. I cooked the salmon today in olive oil, salt, lemon, and chunks of garlic. It was really good! I found it fresh and enjoyed the versimilitude of the flimsy bag the fish lady threw it in. The price was only five or six euros too, which seemed a fair deal.

I also bought, with a bit less alacrity, some olives from the man who emerged from his car to serve me (perhaps keeping warm in there?). I have had shocking few opportunities to buy olives anywhere and being in Provence it seemed high time I dug in. I got little black, nicoise olives and some green garlic ones. On the whole they were fine, with a similar touch of unrefined crudeness to them not unlike the savage cuts to the fish steaks. I also got some sort of tomato... thing (a sauce? a reduction?) that I'll try tomorrow. Mostly I was just proud to have taken part in the village commerce.

Tomorrow is the Theoule Christmas Celebration of some kind. We are not sure what to expect, but we don't expect much, though the lights are nice to see already. We do expect it nevertheless to complete our Theoule experience, and we will thus be ready to close up our airbnb and move on to regular big city apartment living.

 Where we're going to live comes with two markets six days a week both within walking distance from us, one very famous, and one supposedly much better than the famous one, but it would be unfair to make comparisons to here in Theoule. It's a different charm altogether. And one I look forward to.