The Shops in Our Neighborhood

I think that we'll make the previous post the start of a virtual tour of our neighborhood. For two reasons ...first being that we've never really described the neighborhood in detail. The second reason being that, with the end of our time here approaching, I've come to appreciate the little things more and more.

We live in an apartment building. All around us are apartment buildings. All the people in these apartment buildings have to buy their food and bread and newspapers somewhere. In Greenwood, Indiana, we would have piled into the car and headed for the mall or the superstore once a week. Here, the local folks tend to shop more locally and more often. On Tuesday and Saturday, they can shop at the street market. The rest of the week they will do their shopping at the local stores.

The picture above is the grocery store that's just around the corner. It's not real big, but it has most everything you need. Not everything you would want, but everything you would need. There is a meat cutter and a small vegatable section a freezer section and dry goods and a couple of nice ladies who work the checkout lines. So long as you can get there between 8am and 6 pm, you will not starve.

The intro picture is the neighborhood bread store, or boulangerie. It too is just around the corner. It opens earlier...probably about 6 am and stays open until 7 pm or until all is sold. The picture below shows the pastry cabinet - full of croissants and pain chocolates and pretzels and stuff. The French, as a rule, are not into a breakfast of cereal or fried eggs. Most likely they will make a quick breakfast out of pastries such as these.

Or they might take a baguette, like those behind the nice lady above, and smear it with butter and jam to make their breakfast. Needless to say, there is usually a long line at the bread store each morning.On Sunday, everything is normally closed. It's a tradgedy if on a Sunday we discover we have no more bread or eggs or milk. Luckily, if we walk about six blocks there are a couple of corner markets (like the one above) that are open on Sundays. These are really tiny markets. Though it may sound politically incorrect to point this out, the fact is that these markets are normally run by Arab families or Jewish families. Makes sense since the Sunday-day-of-rest is more of a Christian tradition.