Savvy Shopping

The Sunday morning market was interesting.  The night before I smugly reached for my wallet in which I thought I had a 10€ bill and some large change in order to buy the majority of my food for the week, you can fill your kitchen FULL of vegetables, fruit, eggs, cheese, and meat normally for under 20€ and if you do it right for under 10€.  So I was preparing to crunch the figures a little bit this Sunday, but I was thinking I would still be able to buy a snack pack of first of the season strawberries, some avacados, or a couple new types of vegetables; I had lots of leftovers and some vegetables left from last week so I was looking forward to trying out some olives or something new like the homemade lemon confiture I saw last week.  Wrong!  I looked in my wallet and there was no 10€ bill in fact there were no bills at all! Then I remembered I had used that bill to pay for my bike's front brake earlier in the week.  Crap.  I looked in my change, 4€.  Crap.  I looked in my backpack, the side of my purse, the pockets in all my coats and the drawers.  Yeah! I found some more change.  I counted it out and I had 6.67€.  This was gonna take some fancy footwork, but I needed my Sunday morning market food dang it.  

The mistral was blowing at 80km an hour when I walked to the market pulling my basket behind me like a parachute.  When I got to my lady (carrot crunching christophe's mom and grandma) I noticed they had not put their usual price tags on the produce due to the wind and I thought 'oh no how am I going to figure this out'-slight panic.  I went back and forth between different sellers with their prices.  Certain foods are sold by the kilo, by the piece or in groups so I became very 'perspicace'.  The grocery doesn't stock good fresh fruit so I knew I needed to get those things there.  When I checked out with my lady (it was the grandma this time) she ringed me up for 3.31€, I pulled out my change and began counting.  I ended up using lots of pennies : ).  She chuckled at me and handed back my final 11 cents in .02€ and .01€ centimes, to which I said 'ahhhh merci beaucoup c'est trop gentille' ( she knows I'm hooked now : } ). Then I went to another vendor to finish off my shopping, and returned home.  

My haul?

4 large bananas
1 large green cabbage 
2 pears
1 large head of lettuce
1 zucchini 

-> 4.35€

It might not sound like a lot but I was proud of my shopping accomplishment.  I saved the rest to buy a nice loaf of bread or coffee for when I would go out.  I'm going to challenge myself to see if I can do better at another market.  French markets are amazing!


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