On my recent ramble through Switzerland and France, I had the opportunity to do so many cool things! One of my absolute favorites was our visit to the Bastille Market right in the middle of Paris.
I had the pleasure of meeting my nephew's boss, a wonder of a woman who is a nuclear scientist and chairperson of nuclear criticality things. I had an absolute blast with her, talking reactors, tomato varieties, and about all things food. She was the one who wanted to show us the Market, as she visits it every time she is in Paris, which, due to her occupation is a quite frequent happening.
As we were staying over in the lovely part of Paris that is known as Boulougne-Billancourt, the nephew and I hopped on the metro and headed toward the center of the city where the Bastille is located. The Marche Bastille is an artisan market containing food and flowers of such high quality that it almost overwhelmed my little homesteading hobbit brain.
But I get ahead of myself. Before we even got there, we had to meet our cohort, and even beyond that, an entire Paris marathon and blocked off streets greeted our eyes as we emerged from the Metro tunnel.
After a bit of participant dodging and running back under the streets through the underground tunnels, we finally arrived at the center square in front of the Bastille statue that had culinary and agriculture sights galore.
The first thing I saw was endless beautiful flowers! The diversity of the blooms warmed my heart. Here in the states you see a lot of the same, standard varieties most of the time. Not at the Marche Bastille. My face broke into the most adoring smile.
My eyes lit upon vibrant ranunculus, glistening fish, and proud asparagus spears. The lover and producer of food in me beamed as I oohed and awed over all the glorious comestible offerings!
The produce absolutely captivated me, because not a watery nitrogen plumped, glyphosate abomination was in sight. Each bit of produce that my eyes lit upon was alive and blessedly diverse. I just couldn't believe my eyes and my joy often reflected back from the vendors themselves at me as I just couldn't keep such joy from spreading. I so admired everything about their lovingly, good stewardly raised wares.
In my next post I will focus more on the food, this post was for the flowers. Lisianthus, azaleas, lilacs, statice, roses of every hue, peonies in bud, every kind of flower conceviable lined vendor stall after vendor stall. I have never seen anything like the flowers of Paris, it was like the love of the floral bloom permeates the make up of the city.
And I sure wasn't complaining.
My happy nose will recount my delighted taste buds and ocular region when it comes to food in the next post. The market's comestible offering absolutely didn't disappoint, in fact, our lunch was a lifelong dream of mine, ever since high school French class to be exact.
Til next time!
And as most of the time, all of the images in this post were taken on the author's envious it doesn't come in the scent of the Bastille Market iPhone.
