Fountainbleau

 June 21 Tuesday

Today is market day in Fountainbleau. Market square is a half block from our place. And tonight there are music stages around town. Seems like a good day to stay right here and explore. And we need to do laundry. 

Fountainbleau is a charming old town that is famous for the grand chateau that was used by many French kings and Napoleon.

We start with a coffee and croissant at a little place next to Market Square. There are soooooo many sidewalk cafes and pastry shops. First mission is to find the laundry mat and see what we will need to use it. Just coins? Detergent and where do we get some? The laundry mat is about 4 blocks away. Can use a credit card and can buy small amounts of detergent there. We’re all set. We walk back, get our laundry and get it started washing. While it’s washing we explore a bit and find an entrance to the chateau grounds. Hmmm. Seems pretty quiet. We find that it is closed on Tuesdays but the grounds are always open. We were planning to tour the castle this afternoon but we have time on Friday before catching the train for Brugge. 

We poke around the market. It is an interesting mix of everyday stuff,vegetables,meats, jams, honey. The thing that surprised me the most was the person selling mattresses. The vegetables all looked really good but also really expensive.  Nine dollars for a pound of beans??? Lots of people were buying. We refrained.

Cleaning up after market day

After putting our clean laundry away, we headed back out for a light lunch to take to the grounds of the chateau and eat. There was one shop that had a long line waiting to enter. Must be the really good one. That’s the one we go to. We got 2 croissants, a rhubarb tart with fresh fruit on top and a strawberry something. We find a shady place to sit in the castle grounds to eat. The croissants were so light and buttery and my tart was Devine.

The sun is out and the sky is blue. A great day to take pictures of the outside of the chateau. We’ll, that took several hours as we kept discovering more areas of the grounds. I’m really glad that we’re experiencing them without the tourist mobs. They are filming something on the grand entrance staircase. It would be fun to come across that in some show. From the dialogue I was able to catch, it seemed like it might be a travel documentary kind of thing.

After a bit of a rest, we go back out for the evening festivities. We have dinner reservations at Le Bistro 9 which we located earlier today. The streets are filling up with people and are blocked off to cars. It’s a good thing we have reservations or I don’t think we would have found a place to sit down to have dinner. 

We start with escargot. 

 

We chose 2 different main courses so we can try more things. We have a veal dish and a steak dish with fancy sauces that were delicious but I can’t say now what they were. They also came with carrots, asparagus and green beans. Somehow we manage to order desserts as wells. A three chocolate one and a strawberry cream one. Both were good but the chocolate one was better.

The people watching is superb. The streets have filled up even more while we were eating. We head over to Market Square where the biggest stage was set up and is also on the way back to our place. The square is hopping. The scheduled band is called Whiplash. Two women guitarists/singers, a bass player, keyboards and drums. We wait for about 10 minutes for them to finish setting up and start playing. The people around us seemed to know the words and were singing along. A few of the songs were in English. It was really fun to be in the middle of the energetic crowd. The crowd around us was quite young, probably early twenties. We decided to give them their space and retreat to a quieter area. Then we retreated to an even quieter area- our Airbnb. It is close enough we still hear the music and see the strobe lights reflecting in the windows. 

Update, they stopped at midnight. And so will I.