ATTENTION, BARGAIN SHOPPERS!

Every Thursday there's a street market in Valkenswaard on the square in front of the Saint Nicholas church, which is in the centre of town. Valkenswaard is a small city of plus or minus thirty thousand inhabitants in the south of the Netherlands surrounded by fens and forest, ten kilometres from the Belgian border, an equal distance south from Eindhoven.
Eindhoven you may have heard of: Philips Electronics.
Valkenswaard is a pleasant burg.
Good people.

But if we hadn't moved there when I was six, I never would have heard of the place, and likely not visited either. Just mentioning that for context.

Very much is offered at Dutch street markets, your money is worth more there. Such things are among the more likable aspects of life in the country.


DE MARKT -- VALKENSWAARD

[SOURCE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8MeCZNVdfg.]


The author of this clip is Marijke Maes, who may have been in highschool in 2013. Probably at the successor to the Hertog Jan College (which no longer exists). Other than that, I do not know much (or anything, really) about her.


My mother would in Autumn drag me along to the market when she bought bulbs to plant in our garden; because of her lumbago, sticking them in the ground under her supervision was my job. In Spring and Summer she bought young shrubs. We had a lovely garden.

My father, brother, and I would often get herring at one of the seafood stands. Or smoked fish, which was delicious.

I remember one summer day when a sudden rain storm flooded the bins of a fish merchant, whose wriggly eels made a desperate bin for freedom in the gutters along the east side of the square, approximately where Jo D'n Urste is now. Several of us boys gleefully chased them before they could disappear down the drains.

Very late in the year you could also buy freshly dressed game there.

Somewhere I still have recipes for Konijn met Mosterdsaus, Konijn met Donker Bier, and "K'nien mee Prumen" (stewed thumper with dried plums). Haven't done those in years, as my apartment mate fondly remembers the pet bunny rabbit her brothers had when she was still a child.


Yeah, I could do probably it when she's not at home.
We don't eat together, and it would be easy.
But evenso. She'd probably find out.
Not worth the recrimination.

[Foto: BHIC, Collectie Provincie Noord-Brabant]

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