A good night’s sleep and a rare cooked breakfast of scrambled eggs with fried lardons saw us off to a good start this morning. We walked into town and took in the sights and smells of a bustling Saturday morning market that was taking place under the spires of an ornate church. Vying for trade with the large stalls of the professional market traders were tiny stalls staffed by lone housewives presumably selling produce from their own gardens. A couple of roughly plucked chickens and a turnip or two on one, a few nice looking lettuces and some muddy carrots on another. It was nice to see people buying from them as well as the more impressively stocked stalls. We dawdled outside cake shops admiring the artistic creations within, and discussing which we might treat ourselves to later. First though we found the wi-fi hotspot and I got very frustrated trying to upload photos and send e-mails on a connection that kept dropping and then bumping me back to the ‘Welcome to Alencon’ homepage. Once we’d finished we took a historic walk around the city, guided by a tourist pamphlet much as we had in Bernay. This seems a good way of getting an idea of the history of the place, and making sure we see all the interesting corners we might otherwise miss. It’s a lovely way to while away an afternoon. Kez was particularly taken with an old castle who’s towers were used by the nazis to torture resistance fighters and is now used as a prison. She even made me wait while a prison guard who had turned up for his shift rang the bell to be let in, ’so we can hear the door slam like in porridge’.
We bought a packet of peanut flavour corn puff snacks, which are a new favourite of ours, not least because they only cost 37 cents for a jumbo packet, and with a couple of very pretty cakes we sat on a grassy bank by the river Sarthe and munched contentedly while people hurried along the large stone bridge above.
Fresh taglitelle with pork for dinner tonight washed down with a litre of dirt cheap wine from a plastic bottle. Hic!