Springtime in Paris: Western Aube

Saturdays are not to be taken lightly in Europe, especially in France. I've often thought that if I had the power to change any one thing about travel, I would make every single day Saturday. Number two would probably be teleportation. Saturday is the best day for covered markets in almost any major European city and it is also the most common day for weekly markets. It's often frustrating having to choose between markets on Saturdays knowing that there won't be any at all over the next two days. We already knew we were going back to the Troyes covered market this Saturday morning because the fishmonger had told us that they would be serving hot food. When we arrived we saw the market was a much bigger deal than it had been on Friday with stalls filling the streets and outdoor spaces around the building.

We bypassed the hot food vendors outside and went straight to the large seafood stall at the back of the market. The men behind the counter were super busy and it was hard to figure out whether I should buy food from them and bring it into the restaurant to be cooked, or just order at the restaurant. Eventually the woman from the restaurant indicated she would take our order and her eyes widened as I requested large quantities of oysters, razor clams, and sea snails. I brought her over to the counter to point out the exact spider crab halves that Mei Ling had selected due to having the most roe. The staff got to work shucking the oysters while the razor clams were being sauteed with garlic. The sea snails and crab were already cooked and were served cold. We tossed in a scallop carpaccio for good measure. I overdid our order for the snails slightly, overcompensating for the weight of the shells, but we were able to finish all of them. There probably aren't many families out there that will have a meal like that to start the day but for us there's no bad time when it comes to seafood.

After we were done eating we went to the restrooms on the upper level to clean up, which gave us an amazing bird's eye view over the market stalls. In the plaza in front of the market we passed a vendor selling andouillette, the local pork intestine sausage. Mei Ling turned it down but I decided to give it another go. It had a stronger offal taste than the one we ate at Le Jardin but I still found it enjoyable. On top of the pound and a half of sea snails I had eaten, that would be enough to carry me through to dinner.

There was nothing left for us to do in Troyes besides load up our luggage and drive out of town. On the way back to the Airbnb I tried to absorb as much as I could of our surroundings. This unknown city had been an amazing find, one of the most unique and beautiful that we had experienced in France.

Today we would be leaving the Champagne region entirely. Since our flight the next day was leaving in the early afternoon I wanted to spend our final night around an hour away from the airport. I had quickly identified the medieval walled town of Provins as the most promising location, within the borders of the capital region of Île-de-France. However, almost our entire drive would be within the Aube department of Champagne so I had utilized ChatGPT to identify the most interesting stopping points.

Not long after we got on the road we spotted a hill covered with enormous fields of yellow rapeseed flowers and Mei Ling convinced me to drive up the dirt road to the top of the hill. Sometimes her whims seem a little off kilter but once we got into the fields I had to admit it was a breathtaking way to view the countryside while being a part of it at the same time.

Our first stop was in Aix-Villemaur-Pâlis, a town whose name was longer than its main street. The doubly hyphenated name was arrived at through a merger of three separate municipalities in 2016. The center of town consisted of the familiar pattern of town hall, old church, war memorial. I couldn't really blame ChatGPT - it was doing the best it could with the route I had chosen and it was still more interesting this way than driving straight through.

The next stretch consisted mostly of flat vegetable and rapeseed fields dotted with wind turbines. One interesting sight that we had noticed all throughout Champagne was the rounded clumps of vegetation that were lodged between the branches of trees that were otherwise mostly bare. At first I thought they were birds' nests, then concluded they must be some form of saprophyte. I finally looked it up online and learned it was mistletoe, which I had only previously known of as something to be avoided at Christmas parties. The plant is a hemi-parasite, meaning it connects to the host tree for nutrients but also generates energy from its own leaves. Birds eat its fruit and then defecate sticky seeds which attach to the branches of other trees and propagate the cycle. As we approached our next stop we encountered an unusual sight, the unmistakable cooling towers of a nuclear power plant.

The nuclear plant was just outside Nogent-sur-Seine, a somewhat larger city than the one we had previously visited but still completely unknown as a travel destination. We parked easily in a lot next to the Saint-Laurent church, a handsome Late Gothic building with an unusual lantern structure atop its square belltower. A statue of the church's patron saint Laurent stood at the highest point of the lantern. On the other side of the house there were some beautiful freestanding houses with classical styles, an unusual sight for this part of France.

We weren't really sure which direction to turn next, but Ian found a path around the church that led to a small network of interesting older streets. There were some authentic half-timbered buildings here that hadn't been prettied up for tourist aesthetics and some utilitarian fast food restaurants. As usual for the region, there was absolutely no one on the streets. We stopped into one place to get Cleo a quick bite to eat. The Moroccan guy at the counter asked where we were from and he was pretty excited when I told him we were American. He was making animated remarks in a mixture of broken French and English. I finally figured out he was telling me that Trump was crazy, and I didn’t raise any objection. Then he turned his attention to Mei Ling and asked her if she liked Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan. I don’t think many foreigners cross the threshold of his greasy spoon in Nogent-sur-Seine.

Nogent was about fifty miles upstream on the Seine from Paris, as the crow flies. Of course the river here was not graced with the majestic buildings and bridges of the City of Light, but there was a short span to an island that provided pleasant views of the banks. Slightly downstream from the bridge was Les Moulins Sassot, a large brick building that was a water-powered flour mill until 1990 after which it was converted into an office building. From Nogent, the main road took us through a corridor of pollarded plane trees in the direction of Provins.