Ceret - we wont do that again

Woke to a wet, grey day. As part of the croissant run I checked for weekend newspapers.

This is probably the biggest store in the centre area of Ceret. Of course it sells more
than newspapers; books, post cards, special occasion cards, school supplies, art supplies,
magazines, lottery tickets, tobacco products, gifts ....

along with a large selection of French papers and this selection of English and other
European papers. I picked up the Sunday Times and the Saturday Telegraph. This way
there's lots of reading  material and Mum and I can share the sodukos.

I also walked around town a bit. What a contrast to Saturday. Sunday is suddenly very quiet. Oh, of course, there are the church bells calling everyone to church a couple of times during the morning and its not as if everything is closed. The boulangeries and the butchers are open in the morning as are the cafes. Retail stores are all closed. But there are not many people about and in the rain they huddled under their umbrellas and hurried to get their cakes in fancy boxes and meat in paper wrappers.

Yesterday the Grande Café was packed, we had a hard time getting a seat for our morning coffee
after the market, today we could have had our choice.

At Le Pablo they didn't even bother putting the chairs out.

We've observed that Sunday is very quiet, seems to be a day to gather with the family, have a big lunch. Monday and Tuesday are also not that busy as many of the stores are closed on those days. Thursday and Friday it begins to pick up, the parking lots are busier and there are more people shopping and in the cafes and restaurants. This culminates on Saturday with masses of people milling around at the market, in the shops, restaurants and cafes.

The clouds were cutting off the top of the hills and creeping down into the valleys between

After lunch we decided to go into Spain to shop, we had heard their hours of opening are different. What a contrast. Le Perthus, on the border, was hopping, streams of traffic, everything open, not a parking spot to be found. We continued on to La Janquera, found a parking spot and went into a huge super market. It wasn't really a supermarket. Like the shops in Le Perthus the emphasis was on certain products and they had lots of that product. For instance; there were 2 whole aisles of olives and another 2 aisles of canned fish (calamari, oysters, sardines, anchovies etc). They have a huge alcohol department and that's what we were there for, we needed some more sherry.

They have a serious ham department. You can buy them whole like this (and buy contraptions to hold
them and knives to cut them) or have the butchers cut you some slices off or buy some pre-packaged.
We bought a little Serrano to try.

La Janquera is an ugly strip of supermarkets, perfume shops, buffet restaurants, hotels
gas stations and truck stops. It is cross border shopping at its worst.

We saw more people today than in the whole 2 weeks we've been here. The stores were packed, the parking lots full and the roads in gridlock. We sat for a long time in a stream of traffic making its way back into France, through Le Perthus narrow two lane street and back down the hills on the other side of the border and breathed a sigh of relief to return to our quiet little town.
We vowed to never shop on the other side of the border on a weekend again!