Tourism

Today I saw American tourists in Conflans. I know I'm being a snob, but I find absolutely nothing interesting about Conflans Sainte Honorine worth touring. It's a nice enough town, but it's too small to have museums or worthwhile boutiques (half of the town center is empty storefronts), and too big to be charming.

The Americans were apparently on a river cruise up the Seine and making stops along the way. This particular group of eight or so had hiked up from the river to experience a slice of French life - the market.

They stood clustered in a group at an intersection of the covered market hall listening to a guide explain to them how French people come here every week to buy fresh food. They stood in awe and watched as the cheery poissioniere hollered over the din, advertising a sale on sole as he furiously scraped scales off a little red fish.

I felt like an undercover agent, face to face with my own people. I kept my eyes lowered, lest they recognize me as one of their own and reveal my secret identity.

As the group pulled away I spotted a middle aged man snapping photos of the very same kind of fish I'd five minutes earlier asked the very same poissioniere to behead and filet for me.

"Where are visiting from?" I asked politely. Just to reassure myself for story retelling purposes that they were indeed Americans and not Canadians.

"Santa Monica, California" he answered quickly. He literally shrunk back from me a step, as if they'd been strictly instructed to not communicate with the natives.

Before I got a chance to say something nice about California, he scurried out the door behind his group. Maybe he'd relay to them the anecdote about the aggressive French woman with the incredible American accent. Maybe he should have taken a photo of me.

As I walked off to find a vegetable stand I thought about living in an American's idea of exotic. I still maintain romantic notions of fresh markets, but more often than not I am annoyed by my Saturday morning ritual of trotting across the street to the market. Only because I'd much rather be sleeping in, instead of rolling out of bed, thinking a few days' worth of meals in advance, making a list, and walking over there before the best fish is picked over and the vegetable stands run out of David's favorite peaches.

I guess this one of those moments of clarity where I realize that I'm lucky to have access to food so fresh that I have to shake off clumps of soil and pick off odd feathers or scales before I prepare it. Remind me to remember this life when I'm glaring at florescent-lit styrofoam packages of prepared meat in my local 24-hour grocery store in the States someday.