Les Marchés of Vaison la Romaine

I love to go to the markets in Vaison. We are fortunate to have two: the big, Pope-stipulated (in 1532) Tuesday market and the little market of local producers on Saturdays.

The Tuesday market is both a social and a shopping event. In addition to being able to buy everything needed for the cuisine (and the house), you run into friends and acquaintances and get to catch up on local news. Often, at the end of the shopping, you see residents and tourists sitting at the cafés having a coffee or a glass of wine and enjoying the community/social aspects of the day.

On Tuesdays, you can purchase vegetables and fruit from 20 vendors and meat from about 10 or so trucks – not including the dried sausage vendors who account for another five or six stalls. There are usually four fish mongers offering everything from albacore to sea urchins; seven or eight olives and olive oil, dried fruit and nuts vendors and an equal amount of cheese vendors. (Some cheese vendors offer the full array of French cheeses, some offer cheese from only a certain region such as the Jura and some offer only their home-made goat cheeses.) There are several honey vendors offering locally produced honeys and preserves.

Tuesday market - one of the 'Spice' trucks

If you are hungry while shopping, you can choose from pizza trucks, roast chicken trucks, paella stands, fried rice and egg roll stands, nougat stands, sugared fruit stands or a full-line bakery. Many of the vendors offer organic options. If you need a tablecloth or napkins or runners or flatware or pottery or cooking utensils or high-quality knives, you will find them at the Tuesday market. You can buy shoes, scarves, belts, socks, gloves, hats, clothing (both new and used items), thread to repair clothing, sewing machines to make clothing… If you prefer, there are live plants – pots of both ornamentals and vegetable starts including olive trees.

I needed a new gasket for my espresso maker. I found it at the market on Tuesday. Books – new or used? Tuesday market. Music – new and used? Tuesday market. Soap or perfume? Curtains? Artwork? – you guessed it: Tuesday market.

Fish?

The Tuesday market offers an amazing array of – everything. We have big box stores in the States many of which would be hard pressed to offer the array of items one finds on Tuesdays in Vaison la Romaine.

(The locals like to shop at the market in the spring and fall but often avoid the market in the summer as there are so many people there that it becomes difficult to walk from one stall to another. But then, the population of Vaison does double in the summer.)

The Saturday market, by contrast, is the ‘locavore’ market. In the fall/winter/spring, there are about a dozen stalls offering locally grown vegetables and fruits, poultry and eggs, honey and jams, olive oil, olives and tapenades and, in January and February, truffles. A fish monger parks his truck at the end of the parking lot. (The market doubles in size in the summer but still offers only locally grown or produced items.)

Troyes

France is often called “the hexagon” by the French. If you squint while looking at a map drawn by a lazy cartographer, you can see that the name fits. Two weeks ago, we started a triangular tour when we drove from Vaison-la-Romaine to Troyes on our way to Paris. We then went to Ornans and back to Vaison. Given the distances covered, we might have driven over about one/sixth of “the hexagon”…

Troyes was a pretty town. It is located in the champagne region of France on the Seine about 150 km from Paris. We found a B&B there that was in a loft apartment in an old factory. The skylights (a veritable ‘glass ceiling’) and the renovations made it a beautiful spot to stay.

The old town was just five minutes away by foot and has beautiful churches and buildings with a hint of the architectural style we saw in Besançon and Ornans. Many of the old buildings date to the 1500s.

These buildings lived apart for too many centuries...

The hosts at our B&B gave us several recommendations of restaurants and we chose Pizzeria Giusepino where one can get “…the best pizza in the city, in the department, in France! – or so we were told by a man who gave us directions when we got lost.

Troyes is worth a visit. The next time you are driving in France, try Troyes!

Sibling visit

We met Sue and Bob as they arrived in Paris. They had come to visit us, to celebrate their anniversary and to do some genealogy research in the eastern part of France. (Bob DuVernois’ family is from Franche-Comte – at least that is where most of the villages named Vernois are located.)

Paris is always a wonderful city to visit. The city has so much to offer and is filled with so many interesting people. We ate well, walked a lot and enjoyed three days of warm, sunny weather. We went to see: “How to Become Parisian in One Hour” and now know: wear black, never smile, never make eye contact… - a fun-filled one-man show that mocks the French as well as every other nationality in the theater. We went to “A la Biche au Bois” restaurant – as we do on every visit to Paris and again were pleased to share this restaurant with my sister and her husband. We also did the ‘tourist thing’ and took the ‘Bateau Mouche’ (river tour boat) tour of the Seine. The day was clear and warm and we enjoyed seeing several of the major sites of Paris from the river.

We left Paris and drove southeast towards Besançon where we got to see an old friend. She invited us to stay with her and asked us to go to her classes and speak to her students (in English). After our “English classes”, we started visiting the Vernois villages. Google maps had identified four of them; the Garmin GPS had found a fifth… All of the villages were small – I would guess about 400-500 people. After we arrived in each one of the villages, we took pictures of the town sign and then went to visit the cemetery to see if there were any ‘Vernois’ buried there. Two days of visits (and about five hundred kilometers on the car) but no luck.

Franche-Comte is very different from Provence. The architecture is different. The houses use a lot more wood in the construction. The outside of houses look like what I call Tudor style with exposed beams and stucco. Add to that long, steep-sloping roofs and a different tile used for the roofs and you start to get an idea of the architecture of Franche-Comte. In Provence – at least our corner of Provence – there are a plethora of vineyards and wine tasting rooms. In Franche-Comte, the wine tasting rooms are few but the cheese tasting rooms are ubiquitous. (Franch-Comte cheeses are renowned: Comte, Morbier and Mont d’Or, to name a few. – though I have never seen Mont d’Or for sale in the States…)

We stayed in Ornans while we did our genealogy research. A lovely village. A lovely hotel (La Table de Gustave). Before leaving, we went through the museum dedicated to Gustave Courbet, an artist born in Ornans and a major influence (my perspective) on the development of the impressionist style.

Ornans

 …And then to Vaison la Romaine!

Notification of posts

Several of you have asked to be informed of new posts. In the earliest days, if you became a follower of my blog, and noted your e-mail, you received a notice of new posts. The service changed and several of you reported that you were not receiving notices anymore.

Google has added (added back?) the e-mail notice function. In the top left corner of this post, you will note: FOLLOW BY EMAIL with a space for inserting your email. 

If you try it, please let me know if it works for you.

A Walk in the Park

Le Sentier le Mérindol les Oliviers

I have mentioned in previous blogs the hiking system in France and the number of well-marked and well-maintained trails that are available to us.

Sunday, we went with Jane to hike the “Sentier le Mérindol les Oliviers”. The terrain was not very challenging – a short climb up a hill and then vistas that were breath-taking, then around a summit on top of which is an old medieval castle that has been restored and made into a family dwelling, back down the hill (on tarmac) to the starting point. The route was well-marked and it was clear which paths we were supposed to/allowed to take.

Castle from the south

Castle from the north

Cherry Blossoms

Potty Talk

We went to one of the five cafés on Place Monfort – the square in the center of town  - for lunch and, before we left, I went to the bathroom. The trip is a common occurrence given my age and the elasticity of my bladder. Anyway, it made me think of the differences between restrooms in the States and in France.

The first big difference is that in France, the bathroom is NOT the toilet room. Most of the time, the toilet room is separate and, if you are lucky, has a sink for hand-washing (we don’t). The French explain that the bathroom is for bathing. The toilet room is for toileting but NOT for toiletry which occurs in the bathroom.

So, when you are in a restaurant, you ask: “Où sont les toilettes.” Always asking where the toilets (plural) are, but when you get directions and arrive at the toilettes, there may be only one. But you can never ask : « Où se trouve la toilette? » Because « la toilette » refers to doing your morning time in the bathroom in front of a mirror (faire la toilette).

There is a big difference between toilet rooms in the states and here. In France, most toilets offer a two-button flush: one for light, one for full flush. The second difference is that French restaurants don’t seem to have to comply with ‘handicapper accessible’ to the extent that American restaurants must. I believe that most toilets in French restaurants are NOT handicapper accessible. But then, most restaurants are not handicapper accessible - unless the handicapper/chair user wants to sit outside – assuming that the handicapper/chair user was able to negotiate the lack of curb cuts, narrow sidewalks, etc. Note to self: write something about handicapper accessibility…

Another difference is that the French are much less puritanical than we, so, there might be a toilet room for men but the stand-up options are visible to the women who might be walking by… (It is not very different from the denizens of men who ‘water plants’ along the roadways.)

Whether it is a small café or a big restaurant, the “Dyson” hand drier is the “le top” (new French word). It is so much more efficient than the slow, old air dryers. I don’t know how it compares ecologically with the restaurants that continue to offer hand towels…

Oh, BTW (aka ‘by the way’) I almost forgot that there are many toilets in the restaurants that do not have a toilet seat. I don’t know whether it is because they have decided that one more thing to clean is ‘over the top’ or because they have decided that a toilet seat makes it so comfortable that one might choose to remain there longer than necessary. Whatever the reason, few “toilettes” have seats…

"Only Lyon"

About a month ago, we went to Lyon to pick up friends at the airport. Since Lyon is the “gastronomic” capitol of France, we decided to go early and enjoy a meal at one of Lyon’s restaurants. We got miserably lost and almost forfeited our reservation. Despite a WONDERFUL meal at 126, we decided that the city was too large and too easy to get lost and thus took Lyon off of our “must visit” list.

When we told Jane of our experiences and resulting decision, she countered with: “Lyon is beautiful. Let’s give it another try.”

We found a nice apartment in the Croix Rousse section of the city via VRBO and made our plans to visit. Between Jane’s good driving and Ellen’s Google maps, we made our way directly to the apartment without problem. It was a two bedroom apartment furnished in IKEA modern. It also had a garage – a big plus!

The owner explained that the apartment was originally a silk shop – many of the old buildings in the Croix Rousse section were. The area of the kitchen/living room was where they had their loom thus explaining the extremely high ceiling. The bedrooms were used for storage and a small door – where there is now a wall adorned with a huge mirror led to the sleeping space.

Lyon is located at the confluence of the Rhône and the Saône rivers. It has been an important city since Roman times. The old town is located between the rivers on the ‘Presque Isle’. The Croix Rousse neighborhood sits above the old town offering wonderful views of the city. Lyon became the silk-weaving capitol of Europe during the Renaissance. The silk workers – les Canuts – made silk and wove it into fabric. They built covered passages – called Les Traboules – to move the silk protected from the rain from Croix Rousse to the merchants in the lower parts of the city. Many of these passageways still exist.

Ellen and Jane check out one of the Traboules

Despite the decline of the silk industry in Lyon, the city remains vital. It is now called the gastronomic capitol of France. Paul Bocuse, who is one of the proponents of Nouvelle Cuisine, is from Lyon. It is therefore easy to find excellent restaurants. Three days, three wonderful restaurants. Some Lyonais restaurants are called Bouchon which normally means cork or blockage but in Lyon it stands for restaurants that serve local favorites – from local sources. We chose – Le Bouchon des Filles – and selected from the menu du jour from which we chose: rognons de veau (veal kidney), quenelles (shredded fish incorporated into a dumpling and saucisse (sausage). The meal was excellent. Even their pichet de vin was better than most table wines. (Lyon is situated between Burgundy to the north and the Northern Rhône Valley so finding excellent wines is easy.)

Another facet of Lyon is the “trompe l’oeil” murals found around the city. We found two while we were walking but saw another four as we were leaving and driving along the Saône.

Look closely. I am standing in front of the mural!

A major ad from the Tourist Bureau is “Only Lyon”. We appreciated the anagram. It is a wonderful city.