Big Mama: RED RED CHERRIES!

The village of Céret - just beneath the snow-capped Pyrenees - is Cherry Town Number One in Roussillon. It's also a well known art centre, not least known for its Musée d'Art Moderne, documented by yours truly in an earlier blog post. And just to make it clear - cherries are my absolute FAVOURITE berries!

Table mat in Céret restaurant

For some reason I'd never visited the annual Cherry Festival in Céret, but this year it was finally time! My friend and I got there early in the afternoon on the Sunday of the festival weekend, all set and ready for cherry shopping, cherry eating and cherry contest watching. Surprised at the easy parking access and the relatively small crowd in the streets, we were soon to learn that we hadn't seen nothin' yet!

Stalls lined the narrow streets, and there was only one theme: Yes, you guessed it... CHERRIES. Everywhere. Absolutely all over the place. Never have I seen so much cherry decorated stuff. Never have I stepped on and crunched so many cherry stones. And at last I'm in possession of cherry things that I never knew I needed.

Cherry (and strawberry) kleenex box

Cherry jam

Cherry jewellery

Cherry painting

Cherry butcher's window

Hmmm... cherries

Cherry cards? Cherry accessories?

Cherry balloons

Nearly all the restaurants did menus with cherry themes - for instance steak with cherry sauce, melon and serrano ham and yes - cherries. However we had an à la carte menu, but sat at a table next to a family who wore cherries dangling from their ears.

The real highlight - and what we'd been looking forward to - was the cherry stone spitting competition. Set up underneath the beautiful arches, the contest was complete with red carpet (stone was out if it did not land there), speaker, referee and three cherry trees for prizes. The cherries had to be consumed before the spitting started - with only stones left in the mouth - otherwise things would be slowed down. An elderly woman seated in front of us made it her duty to point out exactly where the stones landed, and the excitement was electric!

A bit unfair perhaps, that children, teenagers and adults participated in the same class - most of the little kids' stones landed right in front of them. The longest hit was 9.5 metres - and this was of course a grown man's achievement. And he had probably practised too!

When the contest was over and we tried to make our way back to the car park, we got stuck in the crowds. Oh wow, was it slow-moving! On the way we bought 3 kilos of cherries (10 euros)! Full of inspiration we spent some time practising our cherry stone spitting in the car park when we finally got there, and decided to join the competition next year. There was a shortage of fifty-something-year-old girls in that spectacle - and we're definitely going to change that!

Watch out Céret - you ain't seen nothin' yet!