A Canadian in Paris, Part 2: Market Value

I woke up later than I’d planned. I’d best get moving if I want to experience artistic ecstasy at the Louvre, and still have time to lose myself in the ultimate flea market, all before 6pm. No time for dawdling. Where’s that market? Oh dang, I accidentally closed that tab. Google search… markets in Paris… oh, here it is. Marché St. Denis. Quick. Find it on the map. Find the Louvre. Find a route between the two. Hmmm. No simple route presents itself. That’s okay. I will ask the informative people at the Louvre. They are designed to be helpful. So one would assume.

And off I went. Metro. Louvre. Artistic ecstasy. Check.

“Excusez-moi? Quelle est la meilleur route au Marché St. Denis?” I asked, pointing to the place I’d circled on my map.

“I speak English,” replied the girl behind the tourist desk. Like I’d asked.

“What’s the best way to get to this market?” I asked again.

“I went there once,” she said, coolly. “I didn’t like it.”

Did I ask what language you speak? Did I ask if you like flea markets? Of course you don’t. You’re a snooty, polished Parisian who works behind the information desk at the snootiest, most aristocratic cultural destination on the planet. Just tell me how to get there, already.

She told me. I went. I was beside myself with anticipation.

I emerged from the metro. Map in hand. It told me nothing. I looked around. No market. “It’s really big,” I thought. “I might have to walk a little ways. I’ll just step into this cozy little bar and ask this kindly Frenchman.”

“It’s closed today,” he said. “It’s usually right there, in the square, but it’s only open on Sundays and Wednesdays.” Something like that.

What kind of market isn’t open on a Saturday afternoon? The disappointment flowed through me. No. Not this. Anything but this. I came such a long way. I could have gone to another museum. More artistic ecstasy. But here I am, who-knows-where, in a decidedly non-Parisian neighbourhood, with nothing to do.

Well, I might as well look around. They guy said there were lots of stores around the corner. Sometimes one must improvise.

And then I did a bit of a double-take. Are those men wearing djellabas? Hot-pink djellabas, with matching Moroccan slippers? I started walking through the empty square, feeling in my purse for my camera. This would make quite the picture for my blog. If I could just pull it off without them knowing it.

I pulled the tourist card, and feigned interest in the store behind the men. I took a picture of it: “Shoe’s Box,” it was called. A curiously English name for a store in Paris. It must sell shoes, I thought, and took another picture. Then I did my sneaky tourist-turn, and pretended to set up for a tacky tourist snapshot of the oh-so-disappointing market square, in which an entourage of hot-pink-djellaba-men were –oh no!— climbing into their car and driving away. Disappointment upon disappointment. What a photo it would have been.

Oh, well. I might as well check out the Shoe’s Box.

And don’t you know? It was a bargain-hunter’s delight. A weird delight, with not a single pair of shoes, but with all manner of clothing and accessories on display amidst an assortment of red, racy lingerie. It was odd. Decidedly odd. Could I look at the hats, I wondered, without appearing to associate myself with the racy lingerie? Of course I could. I tried every single one of them on (the hats, I mean), and bought two. They were eight Euros each. For that price, I could have bought three.

The proprietors were French-speaking Asians. I wonder if this is Chinatown, I thought. It never occurred to me that Paris would have a Chinatown. I’d best check this out.

I had a look at the ugly, overly sensible shoes in the “Pieds Sensibles” shop. I don’t need shoes anyway, I sighed. On my way out, two old women, deep in conversation and smelling of cigarette smoke, suddenly noticed that they had a customer who was about to escape. Sorry, madams. No shoes for me.

I walked a ways down the street in search of more bargains. I turned the corner, and again, voila! Here was the magical street of which the guy in the bar had spoken. And what an interesting street it was, teeming with people of all different colours and cultures. There were women with head coverings, making me feel oddly at home. It was nice, I thought, to escape the overly-stylish homogeneity of downtown Paris. I heard different languages everywhere I turned. Even the French was flavoured with unexpected accents. What a funny, savoury Paris I had found!

I wandered from shop to shop, buying funky French fashions for half of what they would cost in Morocco. The stuff was so cheap that when I couldn’t decide between two colours (who, me? indecisive?), I simply bought both. My shopping bags filled with shirts, skirts, hats, and a sponge that could hold up to eight times its weight in water (this will be very handy, I thought, next time my hot water tank explodes). What fun I was having. How delicious it will feel to wear these things and tell people I got them in Paris. Oh, what a fashion queen I am.

I kept turning corners, and wandering this way and that, listening to the rainbow of languages around me, and suddenly stopped short. Wait. Is that Moroccan Arabic? No, it can’t be. Moroccan Arabic is unique to Morocco, silly. But the guttural gargling words sounded just a little too familiar. And sure enough, there were a bunch of chattering ladies behind me, looking suspiciously North African.

Odd, odd, odd. What a funny place this Paris is. And it’s only getting odder. Look, there’s a café, populated solely by men, who sit outside drinking tea and eyeing (let’s be honest) the women walking by. And there’s a butcher. Catering to Muslims. Displaying animal heads, and cooking meat on a streetside grill. A home décor store with a “Maroquinerie.” There’s nothing but crappy, pre-packaged curtains inside, but still. And here… this clinches it: An advertisement for a bank with low fees for wire transfers to Morocco!

How much odder could this holiday get? I had left Morocco in search of the ultimate Parisian experience, and found myself where else, but in little Morocco! How do these things happen to me? What does this say about me? Am I more at home among Moroccans than snobby Parisians? Or am I just some kind of medina magnet? Everywhere I looked, I encountered the sights, sounds, and smells of Casablanca. Like I said, life can get a little surreal sometimes.

After that, I found myself noticing little Moroccanisms all over the city. In my B&B, there was a book about Moroccan art. The tourist shops sell soaps made with Moroccan argan oil. And when I returned to Casablanca, I found little bits of Paris all over the city. And then it all began to click: this tenuous relationship between Morocco and France is rooted in all sorts of history of which I am only superficially aware.

Parisians, I suppose, see Morocco as some kind of exotic, colonial outpost; a conveniently French-ified vacation destination or a business opportunity for the wealthy entrepreneur. Morocco, at the same time, sometimes seems desperate to imitate the glamorous modernity of her big sister in Europe. The upscale stores in the malls boast of their Parisian fashions. The bakeries sell French pastries. The policemen even sport berets.

At the same time, Morocco remains cradled in its past. It prides itself in its mint tea, its Islamic architecture, and its Berber heritage. Donkeys and camels remain parts of everyday life. Arabic is the language of the heart. Traditional dress is common, even in the most modern parts of the most modern cities.

It’s like a giant identity crisis, with this African country struggling to determine if it is new or old, oppressed or liberated, fiercely independent or sadly tainted by the marks of its colonial past.

And I, too, feel this tension when I travel between the two. Why does the illogical placement of the traffic lights seem quaint in France, but backwards in Morocco? Why would a medina in Marrakech feel so rich in culture, and the equivalent in Paris seem so devoid of it? And why do none of us simply content ourselves with where we are, rather than striving always to produce and reproduce the “other”?

But that is what this world is, I suppose: a complex, infinite entanglement of people, places, values, and traditions. We displace each other until few of us really know who we are or where we come from. Each one of us contains a piece of someone else and their migration through this wilderness, and none of us knows exactly what to do with that awareness.

After my accidental foray into the Parisian medina, I managed to cram in a bit more “culture” before my flight home the next day. I tried to be impressed by Notre Dame Cathedral and the Musée d’Orsay, but found myself more enthralled with mass-produced street art and Ukrainian subway buskers than with the hallowed buildings and famous edifices of tourist book fame.

I saw the sights I was “supposed” to see, but utterly failed to appreciate the high culture with which I had so hoped to associate myself. It turns out that what I was “supposed” to see was the unpredictability of my own convoluted tastes and interests, and the complexity of a world that does not always match its own facades.

When I returned home to Casablanca, I somehow discovered the fateful google tab that I thought I had closed in my Saturday morning haste; and wouldn’t you know it? My intended Saturday destination had not been Marché St. Denis at all, but Marché aux Puces de St-Ouen. That sounds much classier, doesn’t it? Certainly much more Parisian. I suspect it would have been open on a Saturday, and that I would have been utterly subsumed in the pleasure of it all. To be abysmally honest, I wouldn’t mind going back to Paris, simply to see the market I missed.

But sometimes the things we miss are important only because they steer us to the things we otherwise would not have seen. The Mona Lisa was like that, and so was Kuala Lumpur (yet another story, which I will likely never tell). We speak of “seeing the world,” and only later realize that “the world” is what we see by accident when we’re peeking around the corner for something we’ve imagined to be real.

Reality, the real reality of living, moving people, is tenuous and complicated. You shouldn’t have to fly to Paris to discover such a thing; but if you do, cross the Louvre off your list and head to the St. Denis Market. That is where you’ll find the life.