Find everything your little heart desires, from clothes to blank dvds to fruits & vegetables to rotisserie chickens to linens.... and on and on...
Everything is super cheap, and if it's sunny outside, it's super crowded too.
Nem Chaud: Hot Spring Rolls!
So here is a small memorial to a small tradition that Flo and I had during our stay in Lille. Most Sundays we would wake up around noon and walk to the market and enjoy our "deux nem chaud." Fried to order and only 1 euro each!
"TCHIN-TCHIN!" (Cheers!)
Mmmm...Mmmm...Mmmm...
After getting our Spring rolls, sometimes we'd walk over to one of the bakeries and pick out a nice dessert. Here we have a meringue cookies covered in some chocolate stuff. I had no idea it had meringue inside it when we bought them.
This picture caused a bit of controversy between me and Flo (and will probably cause it again since I added this to my blog). Apparently its wrong to take pictures of people begging for money. Maybe it is. I don't know.
I believe that this is an important cultural element to note here. There are so many people like this here (in Lille and in Paris, I can't say for where else) and I don't understand why because France is supposed to have a really good welfare system. Supposedly, there is a black market at work here in that people are recruited from poor countries and promised french citizenship and a job. Then these people come to France only to find that they will be begging for money on the streets and are forced to give this money back, along with a portion of their welfare checks, to this "mafia" of sorts. If the beggars try to report this to the police, then the "mafia" people will threaten to kill their families back home. Quite a nasty situation to be in. I wonder if this is true, or if this is some story people make up so that they don't have to feel guilty for not giving these people money. The whole thing truly confuses me.
3 comments:
mmm
I'm missing the nems stuff, like 6 or 7 weeks since the last time..
For the beggars, it's true, it's rude to take pictures of them..
the only difference with the US is that your people that ask for money are scary!! whereas here they look really bad..
Some of them are scary in Lille too! All the young ones are scary!
Where can one order the good food which one sees on the photographs?
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