Amboise market

Ever since my first visit to the Loire Valley in 1999 our opening activity has been visiting the outdoor market. Amboise has a market on Fridays and Sundays, the Sunday edition being the largest outdoor market of the Indre & Loire department.

The stalls are set up along the banks of the river. They are roughly divided into two sections: the first part which is mainly flowers and plants and food (vegetables, fruit, bread, cheese, meat) the second, and also the largest part, which consists of vendors selling clothes, (hand)bags, mattresses, furniture and hardware. The part that interests us of course is the food. I’ve visited the cloths section only once, in 2010 when I was in Amboise with my friends Béa and Jean-Luc.

My friends were very intrigued by some of the meat in this counter.

This year Vera and Mats were quite happy to limit our visit to the food section to get goodies for our evening picnic at the B and B. We started by buying a selection of olives: garlic flavoured, stuffed with strips of spicy red peppers and small purplish ‘niçoises’. Next we bought a bunch of crunchy grape tomatoes, a baguette, a lump of farm butter, a cavaillon melon from Spain, 10 slices of ham, 100 gr. of pork rillettes and a goat’s cheese. Little did we know then that this cheese would become a recurrent conversation topic for the rest of our trip! 

Mats and Vera really enjoyed the market ambiance. From what they told me, outdoor markets hardly exist in Sweden and if they do, they are not as lively as the ones in France. We therefore wandered around for a while, enjoying the sounds, aromas and colours, until we decided that it was time to walk back to the car and put our loot in the cool box that my friends had brought along.

The red car in the background on the left was the one causing the commotion.

There was some commotion in the car park as a driver had abandoned his car, engine running, in the middle of the exit way, blocking the path. The drivers in the waiting cars were getting nervous and impatient and started honking their horns. While we were putting our groceries in the car the driver of the abandoned car suddenly showed up out of nowhere – it is possible that he had been using the nearby public toilet – and drove off, followed by a long line of cars.

Lately you see more and more of these typical flat bottomed boats moored in the middle of the River. I think they are just there for aesthetic reasons because
I've never seen anyone actually sailing in one of them.

My first idea was to take the car and drive it up to the castle, but Mats and Vera thought is wiser to leave it just where it was, as there was the risk that we wouldn’t find another convenient parking spot. So we strolled down the river bank, shooting photos and chatting about our first experience of the day. When we walked up the road leading to the square Michel Debré at the foot of the castle, leaving the car where it was, turned out to be a wise decision as the road ahead of us was blocked. We would soon learn why  …