Day 174: Marche vs. Supermarche

Paris, Day 3. Okay, so yesterday I copped out and hit the supermarket. If I was truly in the parisien spirit of things, I would have trundled around to the boulangerie for my baguette, the fromagerie for my cheese, and on and on until I'd been to seventeen shops.

This works well if you are shopping for one day or one meal, but when you're stocking up on essentials for the month, it's a little high maintenance. So, I supermarched it. Only I forgot the one rule of Parisian supermarkets: you weigh and price your own vegetables. I did not do this and was was scolded at the check-out before having my bananas, apples and tomatoes abruptly confiscated.

I never had to learn the supermarche vegetable lesson because when I was here last year, I lived next to the Barbes Metro station where the cheapest market in the city happens on Wednesdays and Saturdays.

Today would be Wednesday.

I hit it Barbes style and walked the kilometre-long gauntlet of yelling, singing, yodeling vendors while getting body-checked by tiny African women with rolling carts. To call this experience sensory overload would be selling it short: the Barbes market takes years off your life. As most illicitly pleasurable experiences do.

The stalls line both sides of a cattle chute where hundreds of humans jostle and jockey for position while the Metro clatters overhead. It's a solid wall of people from about 7:30 am until 3 pm. Line-ups are thick at the cheese vendor and the fish monger, and if you're caught sleeping, you'll lose your spot at vegetable and fruit stands, too.

The produce is GLORIOUS, stacked high into pyramids and piles, propositioning you like street-walkers dressed in shiny orange, red, indigo and green, green, green. As you walk, you pass through scents of juicy clementine oranges, roasting meats, fresh cilantro and the dry tang of cumin wafting up from the spice seller's table – a pallette of cinnamon, chili, turmeric and pepper.

Dozens of chalkboards hang above each stall. Navet 1,80. Carrotte de Sable 1,00. Piment fort. Endive. Courgette. Haricot vert. You watch a vendor wipe his nose before cutting thick slices from a massive orange poitron (squash).

As you move along, the vendors calls ebb and flow in a throbbing crescendo: "Un euro, un euro, un euro. Oh lalalala loooooo! Deux pour les deux! Cinq, cinq, cinq. Yella yella YELLLLLAAAAA! Un kilo, cinquante! ALLEZ ALLEZ ALLEZ! Monsieur dame, just for you! Au choix, au choix. Madame! Madame! MADAAAAAME!" They flirt shamelessly. They sing. They dance. They whistle and plead and beg. They foist slices of oranges and melons on you. They goad each other's voices louder and louder in a form of tomato/zucchini/lettuce oneupmanship.

Someone tries to push a bottle of Chanel No.5 in your hand as you walk. Muslim ladies roll carts over your toes, playing bumper cars with their strollers and your shins. A man walks by carrying several sticks of lit and smoking incense.

At the fish stand one of the vendors, an old man in an apron, stands outside the stall arranging pink shrimp with one hand. His other hand hangs dead and limp beside him clad in a blue rubber glove, slick with fish juice, woodenly clutching a smoldering cigarette.

My camera incites screams from the men behind the stalls. Half of them hate me, the other half use it to boost their sales pitch to even higher intensity. One hands me a piece of the sweetest orange I've ever tasted. "Je veux un photo," he says. I want a picture. I photograph him and buy a kilo of the oranges.

After an hour, I'm freezing. Clouds of breath billowing out and my hands too stiff to count out my change. These men have been here since 6 am and will stay another four hours after I leave. Most look grim, their energetic calls coming from stony faces – faces that don't hide their frustration as you walk away with only two dollars worth of food. The old timers: the spice man, the olive vendor, the stooped man selling radishes and lettuce near the end of the line, they stand silent and watching, unmoved by the maelstrom around them. I climb the stairs and wait for the familiar rumble of the Number 2 line barreling down the track.