Yours truly has already turned a corner and his man flu is on the mend.
I snuffled and sneezed and coughed my way through the night, making sure that if I couldn’t get a good night’s sleep then neither would anyone else. Except Melek, of course, who would sleep through World War III, which worryingly we may be able to confirm rather sooner than later.
Today was market day and so Sarah persuaded me to crawl out of my pit earlier than normally would be the case and after a quick breakfast we were off.
Mausanne Church and Village shot across a field
The market is held is a large car park and there were plenty of customers by the time we arrived, but it was not overly crowded. Thank goodness it was not one of those all clothes markets we sometimes come across in Europe. It was a good mix of clothes, groceries and local products.
There were also plenty of dogs for Melek to say hello to and Mabel to avoid. Although Mabel did particularly enjoy smelling the various food stalls. At one point she stood on her back legs to get a better smell at some cured meats. It’s a good job she’s well enough trained to leave the produce well alone.
The market
Having visited quite a few markets in Italy and Greece in Spring, this market was a little disappointing. The vegetables were much the same price as in a shop and were not being sold by individual growers. The local produce looked lovely, but the prices were beyond what I consider reasonable. 250 gm pots of local honey were €7 each and a litre of olive oil was about €30! For that price I would expect every bee to have been individually milked and every olive to have been personally squeezed by hand.
The garlic stall.
We did buy some vegetables and I bought a couple of lovely little goats cheeses, which will be great on some traditional bread, but it wasn’t long before we bid goodbye to Mausanne-les-Alpilles weekly market.
Since it was our last day in the village we decided to treat ourselves to a pizza on the village square for lunch. These days it is possible, occasionally, to get good pizza outside of Italy and we have had one or two such instances on this trip. Unfortunately today was not one of them. The pizzas were not terrible, but neither were they particularly good and when I am paying €15 for a pizza I expect it to be good. It was pleasant, however, sitting together in the lovely autumnal sunshine.
Old, cut, grape vines
A small domestic crisis has hit Team Basil today. We have run out of proper British tea bags for the second time this trip. On the first occasion it was not long before somewhere, in some supermarket we found some PG Tips. This time, no such luck, and we are just about surviving on some wishy washy specimens from LIDL, which have the temerity to call themselves Lord Nelson. Since we are in France it could be a warped joke pulled by LIDL’s French staff, to name a substandard tea bag after Britain’s greatest naval hero!
Tomorrow we move on. Our next site is only 17 km away apparently close to another pretty Provencal village. On the way our intention is, if we can find somewhere to park, to stop in Arles, which was one of the great cities of the Roman Empire and which still has some impressive remains left.
* Sarah and I have been singing this as “To Market, to market to buy a fat hen” but then being unable to remember the second line. When I just looked it up it is obvious why we couldn’t remember the second line, because we had got the first line wrong! It is
“To market, to market to buy a fat pig
Home again, home again, jiggety jig….”