Monday, 4 September 2006
The Braderie: Lille's big tradition
This weekend crowds packed the streets of Lille for the city's biggest tradition, La Braderie. This is functionally sort of like the State Fair, although the details are quite different. Basically, they don't have front yards in France (houses are town houses that go right up to the sidewalk), so they don't have yard sales. But once a year the city shuts the streets to traffic and allows everyone to have a sidewalk sale at the same time. And Lille's the biggest city to do this, so people come from all over for the Braderie.
Over the years the thing has gotten bigger and bigger, and longtime participants complain that there are fewer and fewer actual people selling their stuff, and more and more professional salesmen who set up big trailers full of jeans etc., detracting somewhat from the treasure-hunting spirit of the original event.
The other big tradition of the Braderie is to eat mussels and French fries. The restaurants all switch to having only that on their menu for the weekend, and they make a pile of all the mussels shells that are left over. The restaurant with the tallest pile is the winner:
So anyway, that's what we did on Saturday, and on Sunday we stayed in and I played with some of my cool new video games, which I'll probably post mini-reviews of soon.
Comments on this entry:
perhaps you could improve the quality of the event in future years by introducing corn dogs, deep fat fried twinkies, or even a butter cow!
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