A Day for Shopping

Hello everyone! So on the first Saturday of our stay here in Amiens we decided to go out and do a bit of sight seeing and perhaps a little bit of shopping! We slept in just a little and then decided to get around and head out the door. SO as we were going to be doing our normal route into town we decided to stop and take a few pictures. First we have a photo of the park we walk through. It is a nice path with plenty of light even at night. It feels very safe and cuts about 7 minutes off of our walk to town.

The next picture is a picture of the estuary that breaks off from the Somme river and runs right outside of our Kitchen and main living are windows. it is sort of like an old canal complete with a lock system. 

 Then we come to a foot bridge that we walk across and from it we can see the Somme River as well as the more central part of Amiens.

We walk right past this power station, but this is a better spot for a picture. We have yet to see the gates closed but the river runs pretty fast through this area 24/7. 

Finally, here is another picture with the power station but also a little more zoomed out. If you enlarge this picture you can see a dome almost in the center of the photo. That is the town center. It only takes a few minutes to get there from where this photo was taken. 

So back to the shopping. Jess loves shopping and I mean really loves it. If I made enough money and let her chase her dreams she would be an international professional shopper with a PhD. Alas I do not run around with large bags of money like the monopoly man. Our first place to visit was the Saturday market. Here you can buy pretty much everything you need. There are vendors for purses, bags, clothing, drapes, bedding, beauty products, electronics, and of course food. We walked through the market and bought a few items which totaled only a few dollars, a dollar may not get you much in the US anymore, but in Europe a Euro can still get you a few things you might need around the house. However this market did not have everything we needed, but fortunately we have arrived in France during a "sales season."
             This is a very foreign idea to most americans. We think of sales as a one or two day event, some are better than others and you have to really look out for the sales at your favorite store. Here in France they have sale seasons. This season is running from about mid January to mid February. In addition to the very long and announced sales period, the date of the sales are posted on almost every store window, they are very heavily discounted sales for almost everything in the store. Majority of the products are typically 50-70 percent off normal retail. It is like Black Friday sales but for an entire month! We ended up store hopping for much of the afternoon, and since the sun goes down fairly early still, we decided to call it an evening and go to the grocery store to grab a few things for dinner and head home. By the end we had each purchased a pair of shoes and a pair of jeans as well as gotten a few things for the apartment and ended up only spending about 140 Euros. Not bad considering full price we would have spent nearly 300. Tomorrow we plan on finding some of the more historic buildings and making some visits there so we can see some of the older culture. Until then I hope everyone has safe travels and we will talk to you soon!