Braderie de Lille

This weekend was Braderie weekend. The Braderie is the annual car-boot sale in Lille, it's the biggest sale of its type in Europe. It starts with a semi-marathon around the town, and lasts for 33 hours once the final marathoner has crossed the line. I'd heard of it, watched documentaries about it on French news, read countless articles about it because you're pretty much bombarded with Braderie information every September, wherever you live.This time, I'd invited my best friend Angélique up to go round the sale with me. I hadn't seen her since before I left for Mayotte, and I finally had a spare room to put her up in, so we were over the moon to be with each other.

 

 

 

 

My first impression of the Braderie was of crowds. People everywhere. I couldn't walk at anywhere near my usual speed, and sometimes, there would be bottlenecks and the crowd would stop completely. I've never been so pushed and shoved around, and I've never shouldered my way past so many other people in an effort to move forward. It really was impressive.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Inside the Braderie, both individual families and professionals were selling their wares. A lot of shops had "Braderie prices", which were something like ten per cent off the usual price. No interesting bargains as far as I could see, but then I wasn't looking for anything in particular : I'd just had all my clutter from before I left for Mayotte delivered to my flat, it was up to the ceiling as it was. As a matter of fact, I had spent the last couple of days going through said clutter and deciding what I needed and what I didn't. The unwanted stuff went in a pile of cardboard boxes, and I'm still taking a box down with me whenever I go downstairs. During the Braderie, any box that I put outside would instantly be rifled through and, more often than not, would either be emptied or disappear completely before I came back home. One box was particularly quick to vanish: a set of see-through plastic desk drawers on wheels, full of leftover makeup and shampoo from five years ago. Literally thirty seconds after I set it down, a lady had picked it up, looked around her rather shiftily to make sure she wasn't stealing anything (or if she was, that nobody had seen her) and hurried off with it. Strangely enough, my folder of Latin lessons from school didn't go anywhere, although it would have made a good doorstop.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The biggest and best-known part of the Braderie, though, is the food. Everywhere suddenly starts serving mussels and chips, even the Asian and Moroccan restaurants down the street who had never seen a mussel before. The most common was moules marinière (with white wine and onions), but you could also get mussels in a sauce made from the local smelly cheese. I even found mussel pad thai. I had been told that each restaurant piled up the empty mussel shells outside, then had a competition to find the highest one. As it happened, there was precisely one heap of mussel shells, outside just one restaurant. The two above were rubbish bins. Very disappointing.