Today I went to the Salon de l'Agriculture at the Porte de Versailles. It costs 12 euros without a discount, but is huge and a lot of fun to visit, especially with children.
I spent three hours there and saw three of the halls: the dogs, rabbits, gardens and hunting one, and the two regions-of-France food halls. I didn't have time to go see the horses, cows, pigs and sheep halls, the vegetable and sea halls, or the international food halls. There is so much to see!
The fair is so huge that a little train helps take visitors around.
The first hall I walked into had gardening supplies and flowers. This strange-looking bulb belongs to Incarvillea, a pretty flower. The sign says, "Keeps away moles and other rodents."
I went around and looked at all the dogs. A sheep-dog show was about to start, with a champion sheep-dog, a bitch, herding sheep. The announcer explained that usually the show features geese. The sheep were terrified of the tiny dog, which zoomed around them and occasionally nipped them. At one point, she even chomped a sheep's nose and hung on for a second. I had always liked this kind of dog before (even in spite of the movie "Babe," which made A into a vegetarian) but I found I didn't enjoy watching, so I walked off. A few minutes later, and a couple of aisles away, I suddenly felt a rush down by my knees. It was the sheep dog nosing her way through the crowd, looking for stray sheep. I heard the announcer say, "Leave her alone! Let her run! She is following orders!" but I still thought it was a strange thing to do in a place crowded with small children.
There were lots of things to buy: hunting horns, hunting coats and boots, knives, binoculars.
There was a stand with beautiful butterflies, beetles and blowfish.
Rabbits of all kinds and colors, including one that weighed six kilos and looked bigger than most of the dogs you see in Paris.
There was one sad place where the live geese and ducks had been replaced by plastic ones. There are no poultry at the fair this year because of bird flu. It has now been found in enclosed, domestic fowl in France-- I heard the veterinarian say on the radio he thought they had been contaminated from straw that had been left outside.
After this hall, I went to everyone's favorite: the regions of France. The first hall had Burgundy, Provence, the central regions of France and the French overseas regions, like Guadeloupe, Réunion, and New Caledonia.
The wine stands were all surrounded by people leaning against the counters sampling delicious wines for free. A loud brass band was playing, and it turned out to be completely composed of very pretty young women in colorful clothes. I bought some heart-shaped soap made of mares' milk and then headed off for lunch: delicious moules-frites (mussels and French fries) from the region near Calais. All around me were farmers and their families, and it hit me that this was probably a very jolly time for them, coming to Paris once a year.
All the way through lunch, some very loud singing came nonstop from just beyond the bar. It sounded like a troop of soldiers. Afterwards I went there to get some coffee. All that noise was coming from three or four young men, who looked like farmers. As I smiled, one of the barkeepers turned to me and said, "They'll be feeling pretty sick by seven o'clock this evening!" and poured himself and the other barkeep a large glass of beer. They clinked their glasses together wearily and took refuge at the far end of the bar from the singers.
Wild boar sausage with juniper
Pâté of snails with nettles or gentian
Everything made of lavender

Flowers and fresh tropical fruit juice from Martinique
From the Basque country: tripe, pork confit, venison stew, sausage, tongue, Spanish-style wood-pigeon stew
The Neufchâtel cheese from Normandy is supposed to be the oldest known in France. The legend is that the heart shape dates back to the Hundred Years' War between France and England, when Norman girls gave them to English soldiers in lieu of saying "I love you." That reminds me that one of my own Norman ancestors was surnamed Langlois, which means "the Englishman." I wonder what that story was....
Candied fruit of all kinds
Liqueurs of strawberry, violet, green apple, poppy, blood orange, blackberry and pear
"Ships" of cinnamon and of lemon
Making waffle cones for strawberries and ice cream
It was fun seeing people from the different regions dressed in their local costume: the girls selling pearls from Tahiti with flowers in their hair, the Caribbeans with a colorful tignon on their heads, the Bretons with their flat ribboned hat, and the Corsican (the black profile is the symbol of Corsica) just looking so Corsican. I felt as if I had left Paris for a while to travel around the country.
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