saturday morning's rose garlic

oh albi, you so charmant

These days, the only time that I don't feel like a giant is when I come out of one of my high schools, the technical school, and have to push my way through the mob of students on their cigarette/hang out break to get out to the outside world. This high school is, I would say, about 90% boys. And most of them are tall, large, rugby-playing boys. Normally this statistic is not to my advantage. However this morning as I pushed my way out to my sunny Friday afternoon, I smiled to myself as I waded relatively unnoticed through a sea of them.

In the States, I am slightly "taller than average," for a girl. In France I am, I dunno, "extremely taller than average?" Most shoe stores don't carry my shoe size (when I ask I get wide eyes, a chuckle, and an 'ah non madame,' without even looking in the back). And I spent about two months looking for a pair of gloves here, and finally I gave up and bought a giant pair of handmade mittens from the grand bazaar in Istanbul. And I wear like the second-to-largest pants size that exists. That is not even possible. How can that be possible? I guess my real question is, why are French women so petite ? They are tiny and minuscule.

Here is my hypothesis: in America, we have so much space. So much. So in the past couple centuries we've just evolved to fill up more of the space. Everything we have is more spacious. Our homes are more spacious, our cars, our lawns (lawns: do not exist in France), our cities are sprawled way the heck out, and we still have miles and miles of countryside with seemingly nothing in it.. So we grew into them. The spaces. Everything over here is closer together and smaller in general. I think it's not really a big deal to go from here to Paris (or to Spain, or whatever), but to the locals, it is a JOURNEY.

Speaking of journeys, this morning I made the journey from my house to the Saturday market one block down the street. One of the things I love about living in a small town in southern France is this. There is a couple who I always buy something from even if I don't really need it because I just really like them and one of them always has their baby in one of those tummy pouch things. They sell dried fruit, nuts, beans, lentils, olives, spices, etc. Their stand is the only place in France where one can find black beans. So, when Brent and I feel nostalgic for Mexican food, we stock up. One time she said to us, "you know, we sell stuff at a lot of different markets around here, and out of all those places, I only have two customers that buy black beans, and it's you two." And proud of it. The first time I bought black beans from her, a very small elderly woman was standing next to me and she said, "I have never seen black beans before...."

baby pouch

Also the guys who I buy onions and garlic from are always so funny. One of them has such a strong accent I can hardly understand anything he says (unfortunately he's always the one who tells me how much it costs, so I just kind of have to guess usually). I picked up this one head of garlic, and the one guy said, "no don't get that one, it's not as pretty as the other ones," so he handed me two different ones, and then when I was paying he put the less-pretty one into my basket, c'est offert ! il m'a dit and then his camarade threw in an extra red onion "because it's the end of the morning," which wasn't entirely true, I think they were just pleased that a young, not-quite-awake-yet American girl wearing pink sunglasses was so interested in onions and garlic on a Saturday morning.