There are about seven bakeries in La Mure. For a village of a population of 4000, that's not too bad. But if you consider other shops, you'll be surprised: five pastry shops, three driving schools, 15 bars, three pizza takeouts, two decent restaurants, a barbershop, two florists, a greengrocer, four banks, two butcher-shops, two sporting goods store, six bookstores, a pharmacy and two tobacco-and-newspaper outlets. The fact that there's almost as many bookshops as bakeries and bars are twice as many might make you rethink the priorities of this little commune.
Buying bread is one of the few reasons why would I dare go out on a street with at least ten centimetres of snow. French people can't have a meal without their baguette. A curious thing, baguette, which is an average size of bread to be consumed by three persons on a normal meal, baguette literally means a stick. The smaller version, ficelle, means a string, while the "family"-sized ones are called flute, which means, well, a flute. The huge ones, the size of a body pillow are called boulot, roughly translates in English as "the works."
Curiously, bread here only lasts a day, not because they spoil easily but rather, they become rock-hard and uneatable if they are left exposed in air. They can become so dry and hard that you can seriously hurt someone if you hit him with a day-old baguette. (note to self: keep one by the door, for self-defense). Thus, bread has to be bought daily (now the idea of a daily bread makes sense!), freshly baked and carried home under one's armpit. Which brings my compatriots here in France to call them pan de kilikili. Which brings me to another trivia. Monay here in France is actually called brioche. And brioches are eaten like desserts or snack. In fact, in the expression, "Let them eat cake" wrongly attributed to Marie Antoinette, the cake in question is none other than our humble monay.
Baguette however have no Filipino equivalent and I don't think there will ever be a local version. It's not the kind of bread that you spread coco jam on. It's more like rice for French meals. But the real purpose for baguettes is for wiping. Yep, wiping. A spoon rarely appears on a French table, and it is only used for soup. So the bread is usually used to drain sauces on plates and then to wipe them clean afterwards. If in my home country, wiping one's plate almost equates to being patay-gutom, here in France, a picked-clean plate after the meal is a must. And the best tool for the job is a slice of a crusty baguette.
By now, I know which bakeries serve the best bread and which ones give out the crappy kind. Each baguette roughly costs 80 cents (roughly 40php) and we consume about two and a half baguettes a day, so that means 3 euros worth of bread is eaten in my community daily. I buy them usually at l'Anthracite, which is not a name you usually associate with freshly baked bread. Anthracite is a rock-like but shiny kind of coal mined here in La Mure until the early 90s; it is so hard, it's almost like diamond. One fist-sized rock can last a month, burning on a fireplace. The bakeshop used to belong to my very good friend, Brigitte, until, in 2010, she decided to sell it to a younger couple. They used to have a saleslady who was fired for regularly stealing from the cash register. Ironically, the couple who bought the bakery re-hired this saleslady and Chantal is still there, everyday, smiling behind the cash register.
(while at the young priests' gathering, listening to Armand's rantings)
Huddled under the warm yellow light,
our eyes shone brighter at the background
of black coats and heavy air.
We broke barriers without lifting a finger
in declaring who are those at the margins
and that we owe them a welcome.
The unfortunate bottom line is that,
under this same yellow light,
we conveniently labelled him who hides
at the periphery's shadow.
