Paris pictures: round three

We arrived in Paris on Sunday. On Monday morning, we took a long Metro trip to The Fleas, a once-a-week street market. I mentioned this in my last post about The Fleas, but I'll say it again. The antiques at this place were crazy. I saw things that I had never seen before, never even dreamt of before. It was weird and wonderful. Absolute heaven for a flea-market lover like me.

Most of the booths were set up like miniature living rooms. They weren't over-crowded like American flea market booths can be, and everything inside the booths seemed to be hand picked by the owners because it was interesting or unusual.

Here's Frankie, hanging out in an Eames-era egg chair.

This booth specialized in really creepy taxidermied animals. The black furry thing on the left is some sort of Scottie dog.

...And on the table on the right? CORPSIE!! (Oh man. This is the stuff of nightmares.)

Speaking of which...

I wish I would have taken more pictures, or maybe even bought something to take home with me. By way of excuse, I'll say this: There were hardly any other people at the antique part of the market, and all of the dealers were sitting in their booth glaring at us. (Or at least it seemed like it.) The only time any of them said a word to us was when one dealer lept up and started yelling at us in French when Frankie made a move to touch something on a table.

I was afraid to engage anyone at the market in a conversation, because then my secret would be revealed: I don't speak French. I felt really intimidated, as if they would mock and/or scorn me if I revealed myself as a non-French-speaking tourist. I'm sure that's all just craziness in my head, but in the moment it felt very real. I think if our trip to The Fleas had been on our last day in Paris instead of our first day, I would have been different. By that last day in Paris, I was starting to get much better at interacting with other Parisians. On the first day... Not so much.

Not to give the impression that I didn't love it. I really did. I just hung back on the margins, like some sort of a mute ghost.

The non-antique part of The Fleas was jam-packed, by the way, and sold all kinds of weird new merchandise. African masks, converse, blue jeans, Hello Kitty umbrellas... You name it, it was probably there. Here was my favorite thing from that part of the market:

I mean, seriously. WTF??