From: thomas@MANITOU.ENSMP.FR (Gregory NOWAK)
Newsgroups: talk.bizarre
Subject: GETTING FED IN FRANCE
Date: 21 Aug 92 13:39:47 GMT


Welcome to French Chef School! I am your instructor, Pierre
Chaiselounge! It's now time for Lesson One, Buying Food in France!
Food shopping in France is unlike what you may be used to in the
inferior countries you come from. There is a wide variety of food
available, from the ridiculously expensive to the unbelievably putrid.

The average French housewife who is too busy making l'amour with the
mailman to buy fresh food has several options: she can go to a
frozen-food store, where ONLY frozen foods are sold -- pastries,
blueberries, stew -- incroyable, n'est ce pas? There is also the
"hypermarche'", a French technological victory over the Americans, who
were only able to create the "supermarket". At the hypermarche', you
can buy everything from pate' de foie gras to raw timber, and wheel it
all up to the same checkout lane...

But REAL French food shopping is done in the street markets. Having
grown up on posters of grandfatherly old French men wearing berets and
moustaches, riding bicycles with baguettes strapped to the back, you
may suspect that the street market is a thing of the past, an act put
on for tourists, much like the entire city of Amsterdam. Not so! For,
while berets are worn only by french men over eighty and american
tourists thinking they are cool, the street markets do exist and are
the main source of sustenance for the urban French person. 

To go shopping in a french street market, you will need:

-- one or more containers: canvas bags, or a grocery trolley
-- a shilea-- shillae-- one of those Irish club things
-- money (means FRENCH FRANCS; trying to buy something using dollars,
    credit cards, or travelers checks will meet with as much luck as
    trying to pay for a cup of coffee with francs in Des Moines)

Upon entering the market, pause briefly to inhale the heady aroma.
What you are smelling is the crowd of other shoppers. When you emerge,
you will smell like them -- proof that you have been accepted. Now,
push on, clearing a path for yourself with the shill -- with the Irish
club thing, and inspect the individual stalls...

The Fruit and Vegetable Stand
Notice first the beautiful patterns: carrots arranged in fans,
tomatoes and oranges stacked in pyramids, string beans aligned so
perfectly they look like a box of matches, and --

WHAT ARE YOU DOING??? DON'T TOUCH THAT PEACH!!!

Clueless student chef: whaa?
Arab fruitseller: 'Zecoute; 'zetservi! 'ZECOUTE, 'ZETSERVI !!!
Clueless (fumbling through phrasebook): comment?
Arab fruitseller: Merde alors! (followed by a stream of arabic
meaning, roughly, 'you deserve to be the 'bottom' in a gooley story')

Now, Clueless, you have just learned the first lesson in French market
shopping -- you can look, you can smell, but you CAN'T touch. If you
ask for a kilo of tomatoes and he hands you a kilo of bruises, that's
your tough luck. All you can do is resolve not to go back there in the
future.  

You will also remark on the great variety of products available at a
single stand. It is not uncommon for one stand to have three varieties
of tomatoes or string beans, four of peaches, and five of lettuce
(although the compost mistakenly called Iceberg 'lettuce' is unknown
here).  This allows us to play another game: each variety is
identified and priced by a small blackboard hanging over the pile,
e.g., 'Franciscan peaches', or 'Kenyan string beans'. Once you've made
your selection, try to catch the attention of one of the fruitsellers,
and tell him what you want. Now, since the blackboards face the
public, he has no idea what is written on them, and knows his products
only by a special set of code words which are never written down. You
are reduced to pointing to what you want, and of course he goes to the
wrong pile. Once the fruit is in the paper bag, it is too late; you
have to pay for it -- you lose. Fun, non?


(this is getting far too long. Stay tuned to this channel for other
episodes:
Buying meat in France
Buying Cheese in France
Buying bread in France
Entertainment in France...)

greg, yes, this stuff all really happened at one time or another...
Newsgroups: talk.bizarre