Au revoir Nivernais and Shopping Etiquette

We've arrived in Decize - the end (for us) of the beautiful canal du Nivernais and the beginning of the jauntily named canal lateral a la Loire.

What can I tell you about Decize? Well, it has 2 huge supermarkets which have conveniently provided a mooring right outside them. It also has a Lidl one mooring further along. And then, 1 further stop and you're right outside an enormous Bricolage (DIY - in Oz, a Bunnings). I'm slightly ashamed to admit that yesterday we cruised to each emporium and spent 3 hours and lots of euros shopping. So, now we have cupboards full of food and wine plus a new vacuum cleaner capable of cleaning up the crumby, crumbly mess that baguettes make. As you've probably guessed, when we walked into town today, there weren't too many businesses surviving the out of town hypermaket competition.There's a thriving market on a Friday morning though but I'm not sure of the etiquette in getting served. It's bad enough in a supermaket queue sometimes. There's a lengthy process that has to be gone through with each customer beginning with 'Bonjour' and while they are slowly packing their purchases there will be a discussion about what they've bought but haven't yet paid for the state of the nation, their granny's cold or whatever. Once everything's in the bag the customer will then begin searching for their purse/wallet and as well as a credit card/cash or often even a cheque book they'll pull out a flutter of coupons for discountswhich have to be scrutinised, added up and the bill readjusted. If paying by cash, coins have to counted out exactly, then the purse/wallet/card/cheque book is put away and the shopping picked up. Then there are the departing pleasantries of good afternoon/ enjoy the weekend or whatever. Hopefully no-one's about to go on holiday or there'll be a discussion about that. The check out 'hostesse' (they have a badge describing them as such. Don't know what the boys get. Haven't seen any on the tills- they seem to be doing the more 'manly' jobs of standing around in the technical depts or security) will watch the customer move away and then and only then turn to the next in line and 'bonjour' begins the whole process again. But at least there is a queue (lengthy as you may imagine). At the market there's no queue and how the stallholder decides who gets served and when is a complete mystery to me and I usually give up. Now you know why our shopping took 3 hours.

Speaking of spending a long time in queues....
This wonderful, long avenue (985m-was someone's ruler a centimetre or so out?) of enormous plane trees planted in 1771 is apparently unique in Europe and runs alongside the Loire in Decize. Quite beautiful.

Les Halles, Decize.