Le marché de Belleville

Our two days at the Louvre were pretty intense, so we decided to have a more relaxing day Tuesday, with just a visit to a market. A couple weeks ago one of our walks had taken us through Belleville and the aftermath of its Saturday market. The area is as ethnically diverse as any place in Paris, and we figured this would make for an especially interesting market. The Belleville market is indeed interesting, and very large and crowded. The cheap stuff is very cheap, the produce not as fresh as other markets we have seen, nor the variety as interesting. The aroma of the fish markets suggested maybe these fish had been to other markets before Belleville. The narrow aisle, the mass of humanity, etc., made for some interesting jostling and groping, but only three times was I run over by a shopping cart (one even produced a muted "desole"). Well, anyhow, this is real Paris, not tourist Paris, and we were glad to have had, and ended, the experience.

Google Earth view; the market runs the length of the diagonal, center left; it's
big, really big

This is the only photo I got inside the market

Happily, very happily, at the end of the market, there was a superb Asian grocery,
and we decided on Beijing duck for the next couple nights' dinners

Poulet noire (in case you've never seen such a thing; we hadn't)

Durian popsicles; OMG; in Paris!

This is what the back-side of a market looks like

Ditto

The only thing we bought at the market were these salicornes, something I'd
not seen since the south of England, last summer

Peking duck in Paris

Vicki made a brief video of the market, which you can view at http://youtu.be/a4hUAUCFbDI. Her second attempt was blocked by a fellow market-goer, who explained, we think, that this was a non-non. Lots of people here who maybe don't have papers, I surmise. Anyhow, this was another of those one-in-a-lifetime experiences.