Saturday 1: Market

Weekends appear to be a relaxed time for people in Rennes; they sleep, go to market, eat, walk their little dogs and then go out to one of the gazillion cultural events offered. I must have a lingering Protestant work ethic problem, because yesterday morning bright and early I bounded out of bed ready to conquer something. I decided on Les Lices which is the large Saturday morning market in the center of town. For most of the week I was convinced the center of town was in the opposite direction from where it actually is. Saturday morning this all became apparent to me and I used my new-found knowledge to make the 15 min walk into town. When I got close, I started following people with empty shopping baskets and walking against those with leeks and cauliflowers peeping out. The market must be at least 1/4 of a mile long covered with open air vegetable and fruit stands organized around two thoughroughfares. Off to the side are rotisseries and prepared stands. The fish people get their own little corner and under a large barn roof are the bakeries, butchers and cheese people. The market starts out with flower stands either fresh cut, or ready to plant. They also had orange and lemon trees bearing fruit. Everyone seemed to have their favorite vendors who were selling everything from olives and American avocados to new Breton potatoes, leeks and really good looking cauliflower. I wandered around snitching clementine samples and trying to memorize the names of obscure vegetables. After I had finished with the produce I entered the hall of bread/meat/cheese. The bread was pretty impressive and much more rugged/rustic than the bread of Paris. They were selling heavily crusted baguettes, kitchen sink sized loaves which they hacked off pieces on demand to be sold by the kilo and these large, relatively flat burned up things which reminded me forcibly of some of the bread coming out of our bread oven at home (attention: they were selling it for a good price). For the less intrepid or the toothless, there was plently of milk bread. I was also fixated on the butchers' cases. The chickens were lined up like an Easter chocolate display except they were whole, raw chickens. The army of posed four legged mammals I thought were dogs turned out to be rabbit. After buying a pain au chocolat and sampling some young cheese I exited into the fish market which is in the open air for a reason. Ahh fish. The first guy I came across was filleting a very flat, very skinny fish with a huge blade. He also had a large display of langoustin and oysters. Other people were selling sea urchins, weird periwinkle things, St. Jacques de Compestella shells which I recognized from 10th grade history as the shell pilgrims used to sew onto their shirts. Anything fishy, and it was there. I got some sort of weird morbid pleasure out of eating my pain au chocolat while staring at salty white squiggly things; everything tasted of fish and it was great. I did need to know how one eats the spiney sea-urchin so I asked my host grandpa and it turns out he has gone sea-urchin fishing with his brother. They wore gloves, brought knives and after they had scraped the urchins off the rocks, they split them open and ate them raw. You eat the sex organs and apparently they are exquisite... I found it ironic that half an hour later they had a rather derogatory conversation about how the Chinese eat everything complete with a traditional French poem to that effect. I gotta say you'd have to be pretty hungry to think to scrape off a sea urchin and eat around the spines. So bizarre how something that must have been an act of desperation back in the cave man era is now a really really really expensive delicacy.