Visiting Flea Markets and Thrifts in France

St. Lunaire

2008-08-26T00:19:00.000-07:00

Saint Lunaire is another of those way too cute seaside villages. It has an 11th century church, of which you won't find a picture here, but take my word for it that it's really cool. It has two rockin' beaches as well. But all I have is a mediocre picture of the nearby field it was held in.

This brocante was small, and populated mostly by professional sellers. Prices were in keeping with the real estate, i.e. high.

The vintage linen lady's tea towel pile. Looking at this picture, I just realized that there are one or two peeking out from the pile that I didn't initially see but would have loved to have! Drat.

The vintage jewelry lady's stand.

The chair guy's stand.

Saint Malo, again

2008-08-05T06:43:00.000-07:00

Our first stop on Saturday morning was at a food bank that was having a rummage sale. Doesn't it look like a junkyard from the outside? Well, it looked just as much like a junkyard once inside, too! There was almost no clothing - extremely rare for a rummage sale - but lots and lots of knicknacks. They had books for cheap, but very little worth buying. I didn't spend much time looking at the other odds and ends as it was all depressingly ugly. My husband picked up a pretty, and very inexpensive, painting of an Italian street scene. That was about all we got out of that one.

Our next stop was in a different section of Saint Malo. It was a surprisingly well-populated street sale. We had fun and the weather was gorgeous, although the kids were whiny. Our first stop was the bakery, to get some sustenance. Yum!

Since this was a Saturday the shops were all open and the atmosphere was festive.

The sausage guy looks kind of bored, though.

Saint Malo, Rocabey

2008-07-30T13:43:00.000-07:00

Saint Malo is a wonderfully preserved medieval city and is absolutely one of the prettiest towns in France. As a bonus, it's got a few nice beaches. If you have never been here, you should go!

We went to one of the rare brocantes that are held on a weekday in a part of town called Rocabey. As it was a Wednesday, there were few regular people selling off their family's stuff, and lots of professional dealers. It was pretty small, but we still had fun. It was held in a square outside the fortified city walls. Looming in the background you can see the church.

As usual, there was a fair quantity of crap. This stand even proclaims it proudly!

There was nice stuff too, such as these old trunks and marine equipment.

I am forever perplexed at people who buy old family photographs. Do they hang them up in their living room? That's what I'd be tempted to do. What do you say when someone asks you who they are? I'm not French so I don't have this issue, but I'm always wondering if one day my French husband will come across a long-lost great-uncle's picture being sold off on the street.

Would you a like a doorknob? Or lots and lots of doorknobs! All ceramic, and all gorgeous.

Merdrignac

2008-07-30T13:34:00.001-07:00

Merdrignac is a cute little town in central Brittany. Despite its close resemblance to the word "merde", which means shit, there's nothing shitty about it, except maybe that it's in the middle of nowhere. The annual flea market was held all around a pretty lake. There was also a playground, tennis courts, miniature golf and tons of other activities, and a big forest nearby. This is a neat place to live if you like outdoor activities. If you're looking for wild nightlife, you're out of luck.

Merdrignac seems to have something of a British expatriate community. I heard them and saw them, buying and selling, in much higher proportion than I normally do, and much more than I'd expect from this place. The upside for me was finding a few boxes of English books. Yay for me!

And this is me reading my English books later in the day... I have got to stop this business of people painting me without my knowledge!

Looking for boxes of unidentifiable, rusty tools? You've come to the right place!

Looking for boxes of unidentifiable crap of a more general nature? You've come to the right place too!

Saint Briac

2008-07-23T03:59:00.000-07:00

Saint Briac is a beautiful port village filled with old stone villas. Sunday morning it held its own big, annual brocante. There were lots of sellers and lots of buyers. Who wouldn't come treasure hunting among views like this?

Even the extraterrestrials were there.

This is a picture somebody painted of me gambolling on the beach with my toddler. All unbeknownst to me! Ha!

All I can say is ouch! my chestal area hurts just looking at this!

La Gouesnière

2008-07-23T03:44:00.001-07:00

On Saturday we went to an inland village called La Gouesnière, a few kilometres inland from Cancale, where you can buy and eat raw oysters on the beach. La Gouesnière's annual sale was in a field; lots of ruts and holes everywhere! But far be it from me to let that get in the way of some good brocante-ing.

At La Gouesnière you can not only sell your children's outgrown clothes, you can dry them too!

Need a cast iron cauldron with a hole in the bottom? Look no further!

This stool is da bomb. I love it and I want it in my living room. It wouldn't go with anything but I have never let that stop me.

A cool assortment of plates, cradled in freshly mown hayfield.

On our way home we stopped at McDonald's, not only because of the play area, not only because you can get a beer with your fries (photographic evidence above), not only because every McDonald's in France has free wifi, but also because the food here is universally excellent.

Well, maybe not that last part.

Lancieux

2008-07-23T03:32:00.000-07:00

Lancieux is a pretty seaside village in northern Brittany, and the Sunday before last it had a nice big annual brocante. It has an old church whose bells started ringing when I was right next to it. Boy do you ever HEAR those bells! They're big thick metal bells, and you can watch them swinging in the belfry when they're ringing.

"Welcome to Paris", the pretty sign says. Except, it's not. Paris is what I'm getting away from.

Does the distinguished-looking guy who once commissioned his portrait know that it's now hanging off the side of a truck?

Would you trust the police that drove this car to win a car chase? Would you trust the ambulance next to it?

What is this mannequin? A child with boobs? An adolescent? A miniature woman? It somewhat disturbs me and I can't quite figure out why.

This picture is here for no other reason than I think this doorway is way cool. It might be the doorway to the village cemetary, or it might be the doorway to some rich person's villa.

Saint Benoit des Ondes

2008-07-07T10:24:00.001-07:00

Today, gentle reader, I am doing field work many miles from home to bring you to bring you a constant variety of French flea market experiences. Which means, I'm on vacation! But my thrifting and flea marketing never stops.

Today we went to a seaside town in Brittany, in northwestern France, called Saint Benoît des Ondes. This flea market was beachside, and there were a lot of professional dealers but a good deal of regular people as well. A lot of the stuff was almost right on the beach. Hope a nice high tide doesn't roll in!

As usual, most of the stands were a mishmash of all sorts of stuff, like this one where Jesus and Mary statues fight for space with a big porcelain soccer-ball-weilding pig.

My exciting purchases included two blankets, because it's chilly here, and a bag of socks for my son. The seller of the blanket let me take a picture of his vintage vanity case, which I admired but couldn't afford.

We were a little bit hungry at the end and nothing hits the spot like some candy from the candy stand!

The weather was cloudy but the rain held off. We got hit by a downpour while driving home but the sun came out at the same time and we were treated to this gorgeous rainbow!

Cléry en Vexin

2008-07-03T11:31:00.000-07:00

On Sunday afternoon we ended up going to another sale, in a village out in the countryside called Cléry en Vexin. The village is small and pretty, with lots of stone houses and a church occupying the main square.

It was fun, and since it was the end of the day prices were coming down. I had a feeling that some of the best "finds" had been found that morning, unfortunately! but there was still some left for me.

Doll parts, anybody? I find this scene strangely disturbing. Right down to the way he presents the doll heads in cute little vintage bowls, I think this seller has the serial killer gene.

Le Vésinet

2008-06-29T12:59:00.000-07:00

Le Vésinet is one of the wealthiest towns in all of France! So how could I miss this street sale? There were booths set up all around the church and radiating out into the streets surrounding it. There were a lot of professional dealers, and the "regular folks" selling their crap adjusted their prices in keeping with the local real estate, i.e. ever upwards. All this under the probing eye of the gargoyles carved into many of the building on the main square.

I met a woman seller with fantastic prices who I'd bought a vast amount of kids clothes from last year. Sadly, most of her high-end boutique stuff was gone by the time I found her. However, she remembered me and I remembered her, and we exchanged phone numbers so that she could sell me her clothes directly next year, instead of selling them on the street. I'm very happy about that. Go me!

I like the blue guitar. You don't see blue ones very often, do you?

And this is a bakery window display. I think the theme might be Tour de France, as it's that time of year again, but then there are motorcycles and vintage cars in the display too, so it's anybody's guess. It is very pretty though.

This is a vintage ad for egg cognac, so cognac presumably made with eggs. Eew.

On my way from the parking lot I crossed paths with a Yorkshire Terrier named Shit. It's pronounced "sheet" and is the local pronunciation of the English word shit, and is also slang for marijuana. Don't say I never taught you any vocabulary. I don't know which meaning precisely Shit was named after, but from my conversation with his mistress it's definitely one or the other. This is a picture of Shit the Dog, who happily rides in a steel cage on wheels, and probably has a perfect doggy life, gets to sleep a lot and never needs to worry about a thing, ever.

Love that 60s wallpaper

2008-06-26T13:16:00.000-07:00

My one purchase at the crappy thrift store I was at last time was this 60s home decorating magazine. I love looking at it.

What fascinates me most is the scary wallpaper gone wrong in these pictures.

Mmmm, total-room wallpaper and formica.

I actually kinda like this next bathroom, but then the wallpaper on the ceiling makes it all horribly wrong. That's no toilet peeking out from behind the wall. That's a bidet! Very French touch.

The scariest thrift store of all

2008-06-25T21:35:00.000-07:00

A couple of days ago I went to a thrift store I don't go to often. It's off in the countryside, and it consists of a bunch of shack-like buildings with tin roofs where all the stuff is kept. Same principle as the previous one: each building houses its own category of merchandise. The floors are dusty and the shoes are covered in a layer of dust. The place is a mess. Yuck.

Holy junkyard, batman! They visibly don't have room to put all the crap under a roof. There's 180° of it, whichever way you look.

The "abandoned games of the 80s" section, with obligatory half of the pieces missing or removed. Recognize any? This, by the way is one of the funniest surveys of vintage games I've read in a while.

This is the clothing section. In the winter it's oppressively cold and in summer it's oppressively hot. I can understand having a few clothes hanging on the walls but having them looming over the shoppers' heads is like living the final horror scene from Attack of the Fugly 80s Wardrobe!

This is the linens section, in the back of the clothes shack. Looks inviting, doesn't it?

I almost never find anything good in this place. On the positive side, there's never a line to get in or to pay, and the "shopping experience", as it were, is uncrowded. Can you figure out why?

It would be unfair to omit that you can come across cool vintage or antique furniture like this armoire, for a fraction of the price you'd pay elsewhere.

An afternoon visit to the thrift store

2008-06-23T11:24:00.000-07:00

Today I spent a couple of hours at one of my favorite thrift stores. Most French thrift stores are nothing like American stores. The buying process is convoluted, it's dusty and dirty, and there's no nicey-nice customer service orientation like you get (more or less) at places like Goodwill. Yet, the crowds come. This particular store is only open for a few hours every afternoon, and you can see the line of people waiting to get in right before it opens.

There's a furniture section; a shoes section; children's and adult clothing; what they deem to be "nice" porcelain and glassware; a different section for crap pottery, mugs and knicknacks; toys; and books. That's not an exhaustive summary. Whenever you find something you like, you bring it up to the guy (it's almost always a guy) at the desk, he eyeballs your stuff, makes up a price on the spot according to how much money he thinks you have, and writes it on a piece of paper. He puts your stuff in a plastic bag and puts it under his desk while you go with your piece of paper to pay for your purchase at a central cash register, in line behind 500 million other people who are doing the same thing. Then you go back and show your receipt and retrieve your stuff. Rinse and repeat for every section where you want to buy something.

Today I found some super-cute vintage dish towels from the 60s: a couple of 1961 calendars with illustrations of the seasons, one of a working woman who can put together a meal in 10 minutes thanks to her trusty meat grinder, and a few celebrating French cheese, French wine and beer (I can definitely get behind those).

Mareil-Marly

2008-06-22T07:07:00.000-07:00

This morning I went to a street market in Mareil-Marly. There was a scary thunderstorm at 7 am but it blew over quickly. This is what Mareil-Marly looks like after the rain when half the sellers are setting up and the other half haven't arrived yet.

Like most street sales, this was held in the center of the old town, and you can catch little sneak peaks into the courtyards of the old houses. I didn't have the guts to tell this guy to stop setting up so I could take my damn picture!

There were a lot of antique dealers and I got there so early after the rain that most people hadn't put up their tables yet. Prices were somewhat high, not a surprise as this town is most definitely well up on the upper middle class scale.

I bought a cute little smocked boutique dress for my daughter (cheap! and not at all similar to the fashion disaster on the left), and stuffed it into my bag. The seller freaked and told me after having spent all that time ironing it, I could at least fold it up nicely in my bag. Um, lady, it'll get a hell of a lot more wrinkled in the wash, which is where it's going next! Why do people care what you do with their stuff once you've paid for it?

While walking back to the car I ran into an actual garage sale (or house sale, as it was in her house). I am so sorry I didn't take pictures of what I saw! This old stone house had once been a farmhouse. It had beautiful exposed beams and the floors were covered with typical French reddish-brown tiles (called tomettes). She had all sorts of vintage dishes and old wooden items, such as an old butter churn. So much that either she's a big collector or is an antique dealer! It was all so beautiful, though. It really felt like a French country Grandma's house.

Moving away from country elegance into tacky suburbia, I leave you with this vision of vintage garden gnomes. And a squirrel!

Vaucresson

2008-06-21T05:40:00.000-07:00

Vaucresson is an upper-middle class town and their vide-grenier (no professional antique dealers at all) was medium-sized and prices were way high.

A typical stand. I could have bought my very own French cheese-themed memo board (the one the seller is holding).

I like the canisters on this table (the zebra soap holder in the foreground, not so much).

Another brilliant specimen of French kid art.

Hey! That's my kid in the mirror! And my camera, too!

Little buddy got a whole bag of matchbox cars for a euro. After I paid for it I practically had to snatch it out of some dude's hands. He wanted to take a look inside. I paid for it already, nimrod! It's mine! It's a jungle out there.

Speaking of cars,there was a vintage car show going on right next to this flea market, but alas we had no time to take more than one picture as it was time to pick the older kids up from school. I bet you didn't know that most French schoolchildren go to school on Saturday mornings. Incredibly useful piece of trivia there.

We bought almost nothing, but I did pick up a funky-looking JP Gaultier tie.

Avernes

2008-06-15T11:28:00.001-07:00

Avernes is a cute village out in the countryside. It's dominated by its church, and not much else. It has a nice decent-sized annual brocante, though.

I covet this vintage coal-burning stove, I really do. I bet it does a better job than my electric one, too. And the chairs look neat.

Now for the wacky.

Okay, WHAT is going on in this piece of artwork? Naked men stand around while shoes appear on the horizon, the shoes rain down on the shoeless as they leap to catch the pair they want. You can see the Neanderthal-looking one got himself a spiffy tan suede pair. Shoes are donned by the still naked men and all is good with the world. I'm assuming there's a point to this work, because somebody thought about it long enough to sit down and paint it and then sign his/her name to it. What it is, couldn't tell ya.

This looks like dollhouse furniture that somebody made themselves. They even painted rabbits on this wardrobe, and they did a horrible job, too. Maybe it's rabbit-hutch furniture? There's a rabbit-sized writing desk off to the left. I should really be taking pictures of nice wardrobes like the one in the background.

Too bad this picture didn't come out very well, because you would clearly see that this is a lampshade that someone has decorated by cutting out pictures of food and drink, and they did a pretty lousy job doing the cutting out. I assume (I hope) it's kid art, but why someone actually thinks they'll get money for this crap is beyond me.

This doll looks seriously pissed off. I would be too if someone did that to me!

Everybody needs a ducky dispenser. Some people even need three!

A medieval street scene

2008-06-11T14:01:00.000-07:00

I picked this up in Fourqueux. It's a street scene that hasn't changed since medieval times, and I have no idea where it is; it could be any of hundreds of towns in France! I like the perspective; it draws you in. For the moment it's in my downstairs bathroom, which is a clearinghouse for most artwork we bring into this house, while we're deciding where to put it!

Fourqueux

2008-06-10T11:59:00.000-07:00

Well, Sunday we went all together as a family to another brocante after all, in Fourqueux. Fourqueux is a bit on the snooty side and so was its brocante. Prices were high and even though it was the end of the day many sellers wouldn't haggle.

We came across these two bathing (and sleeping) beauties.

And apparently we happened upon the kitschy Vallauris lamp festival! Several of these conch/sea life lamps to be seen. Plug it in and watch the fishies light up. And hope the 70s wiring doesn't short-circuit the house.

"Women and wine are two agreeable poisons" What would a 70's French household be like without a clever saying like that hanging on the wall. Har har.

My favorite of the day was this guy. He's about the size of a five year old and he will hold your drinks for you with that expectant expression on his face as you sit and watch the Euro 2008 championship (which is happening right now, I might add).

Oh, and I bought a painting of a medieval-looking street scene, but the pic of that will have to wait.

A couple of acquisitions

2008-06-09T13:44:00.000-07:00

A picked up a couple of things in Pontoise, for only a couple of euros. First, a pretty mirror, but cracked. Best of all, someone painted a branch and leaves right over the crack so I don't even have to!

And another icon (a cheapy this one) for my icon collection.

Pontoise

2008-06-08T01:32:00.000-07:00

This morning I went to Pontoise. Every year an unexceptional section of town has their annual flea market; lots of families have stands, which I like, because I can buy stuff cheap for the kiddies.

A collection of beer steins and glassware, French and foreign. What is that gestapo thing in the upper left? I didn't notice it when I took the picture. You're not allowed to sell Nazi merchandise in France, even collectible memorabilia, so the relative anonymity of a flea market makes it a good place to sell it.

I know nothing about cars but I thought the ones below were neat.

I want this umbrella stand. I'm a sucker for all things copper.

And this makes me want to go skiing! back in a simpler time and place.

I came early, so the local rotisserie had just put chickens out to be slowly roasted. By noon they will be nicely browned and dripping with juices. Mmmm.

And no day would be complete without a gratuitous look inside the local bakery.

Verneuil

2008-06-07T13:30:00.000-07:00

Today the older girls were in school all morning, so my husband and I went to a nearby town that was having its annual flea market.

I covet the set of vintage ladles to hang on my kitchen wall, but alas, no room. The bag to the right of them in toile de jouy is a bread bag. It's hung in a lot of country kitchens and is used to hold, you guessed it, the day's bread.

Cute Moroccan table

I could just see the two pictures on the right in my downstairs bathroom. The one on the left is called "Marriage" and depicts a marriage from a few centuries ago (I guess). I could just see that hanging in the bedroom. The couple looks so morose!

The ad with the chubby baby on it really raised my breastfeeding hackles. It's an old Nestle ad for cereal to put in baby bottles - a "complete food" for babies. I wish I'd taken a better picture of it because I can't remember what else it said on the bottom... but it annoyed me!

I'm equine-challenged and I know this has something to do with horses, I'm not sure how.

Finally, some colorful Eastern European folk art at an association's table. They are particularly focused on helping Ukrainian orphanages, by raising money to improve basic sanitation and hygiene in the orphanages themselves, and by bringing kids over for a month to stay with a foster family. I'd like to foster a Ukrainian kid one day too.