Day 5--Flea Market



Day Five of my vacation in Paris was a Saturday and so my friend and I decided to do something a bit different and off the well-beaten tourist path. We travelled across town by Metro and went to a very large flea market.



My friend is a garage sale guru, and while I'm not as good at or, nor am able to find the deals that seem to constantly fall in her lap, I also liking looking through other people's junk. We both decided that it would be fun and interesting to have the chance to look at French junk, and maybe we would get lucky and find some cool and original treasures to take home.



The flea market was very large and covered many street blocks, some selling their wares on street sides tents and others in actual small stores clustered together. The front section was full of boring tourist crap, but we ventured deeper in and it became much more interesting.



Just about anything you could dream of could be found here. Old postcards, busted musical instruments, old posters and other art, porcelain dolls, old coins and stamps, furniture, silver ware, crystal, tea sets...I could go on and on, but the main thing I'm trying to get across is that it was totally cool.



One of the first stores we stopped in literally sold junk, boxes and boxes filled with rusty old metal hardware and glass lamp covers, things like that. The nice thing was the man in charge spoke English very well so it was easy to communicate. I have always loved old keys, the old fashioned clunky kind so I asked it he had any. He bent down under his table and pulled out and entire box full of them, plus another box full of old fashioned key hole covers. It was awesome. I must have spent half an hour fishing through the boxes until I finally settled on three key, one large and two small, and two key hole covers, one large and one small to purchase. It was a little expensive, but in my mind worth it.



My friend, on the other hand, had found an old violin the last time she was in Paris at a flea market and was hoping to find another one to suprise her husband. Lo and behold, in a store we entered about an hour later, sitting right there was an old violin. She is the luckiest son-of-a-gun I've ever seen when it comes to getting stuff like that at good prices. It was priced at 50 Euros, but offered the lady in the store 20 and it was accepted! That was less then I paid for my keys...*grumble, grumble* But it didn't matter since we were both so happy with what we had found. She also bought a ton of old postcards and I found some neat stamps that I liked. I tried to buy an old abacus for my husband, but the lady I tried to bargin with would not budge on her price so I let it go. I don't know how my friend gets so lucky.



Many stores had radios playing inside and out and while browsing one shop we could clearly hear the radio playing an English song, "I just called to say I love you". There is was again! What is up with that song? I have no idea, but Paris is the last place I really expected to hear it. My friend and I had a good laugh and continued shopping.



We spent the whole morning just wandering through a ton of tiny streets and back alleyways and had a ball doing it. It was nice to spend some time doing something kind of different in Paris as a tourist and having some unexpected fun.