Saint-Ouen's Labyrinthe: the world's largest flea market (15)

Preface: it's super gauche to take pictures at the flea market, so sadly I have no photos of the actual locus of the walk, just the treasures we found.

The flea market is really set up in two major sections. The first is full of (and please, pardon any racial undertones) North African men making rather offensive and aggressive sales pitches. Their goods are mostly of the mass-produced kind: cheap jewelery, shoes, kitchenware... As for the offensive sales pitches, calling me "sexy" is actually going to make me run away rather than making me want to duck into your tent full of fiddle-faddle-gadgets that I don't want anyway.

There were, I admit, a few stores this tourist-blood-sucking section that appealed to me. First, the proprietors of one store were jammin' out to some Bob Marley and burning some delicious-smelling incense. Good smells are always welcome in Paris, where the smell of latrines will overwhelm your olfactory sensors at any given moment and without warning. Appealing to my sense of smell: a good idea.

The second tent I really liked was a (Portuguese?) guy selling delightful leather bags. If I had had 120€ to drop on the beautiful travel bags I saw, I would be back there in a heartbeat. There's something about that kind of rough-and-tumble-but-still-scholarly leather bag that makes me want to explore Egyptian caves in search of the Holy Grail. Oh, Indy!

The third tent that charmed me was the Indian couple selling some brilliantly colored scarves. All the girls in the group bought (at least!) one. Here's a sampling:


Here's Beth's, a nice mix of colors for a very versatile scarf.


This is the one I bought. The two other scarves I have here (and no that I come to think of it, almost all the scarves I own) are cool colors, so I went for brighter, warmer colors.



And this is Judy's. That deep green... mmm, I like.


If anyone wants me to pick them up a scarf, I'm happy to do it. Just let me know.

Now for the juicy stuff: the real flea market that most tourists don't make it to. My overall impression? A really high-end indie-spirit garage sale. We found some wild things, like gilt fans for 300€ and a lot of really neat period chairs. The shopkeepers all seem to be terribly eccentric--they'll specialize in something like glass beads or silverware or old postcards. It was quite an adventure to dig through row upon row of old postcard, some written and sent, some still waiting for their chance in the mail. I actually rescued a few of these and sent one to my friend Jacob Barrows in Provo, who's an avid postcard collector.

All in all, the flea market, or marché des puces, is an interesting experience, but probably not essential to the average tourist. If, on the other hand, I were refurnishing my apartment off the Champs Elysées with trendy, vintage finds, I would certainly becoming a frequent at the market.