Manila sur Seine

North Africans (or those from the Maghreb as Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia are known in French) are said to be the largest group of immigrants in France. The statistics are somewhat murky since asking about race and national origin is simply not done, at least by the government that is.

But I digress. What I meant to share, before I got into this sidebar on race and ethnicity, is that my own unscientific assessment of immigration patterns is that most of the immigrant household help in our arrondissement is from the Philippines. This may be due to the high proportion of well-heeled English speaking foreigners in this bourgeois section of town. At any rate, there are three tiny little Filipino markets within an easy walk from our apartment, a good thing when you're in need of rice vinegar or soy sauce at reasonable prices. There's plenty of other stuff stuffed into these miniscule spaces, unintelligible to me but no doubt providing creature comforts to the hardworking ladies who are so far from home.