French Children Running Wild

I stopped at the local Monoprix on the way home from orientation today and had reason to wonder why every teenage boy in France was buying armfuls of eggs. They were all accompanied by giggling french girls, chic even at 13 and 14 in their black coats and boots. I assumed the school age children of France simply decided they all wanted omelets for their after school snacks today.  Walking back to my apartment with my groceries, I was almost knocked onto the sidewalk by a herd of French boys all running and screaming to escape a seemingly invisible attacker. When I turned the corner an even larger mass of teenagers had flooded the street all shouting and yelling, some running through the middle of the street pursuing others. It is now, that I notice the aforementioned egg cartons.   How was I to know, this being my first Mardi Gras in France, that on this day children all come cascading out of school laden with eggs and flour sacks in order to throw them around the streets. Like our many halloween traditions that have never made it to France, we in the States have never adopted this practice, at least not in a literal sense.  After a little bit of research, I discovered that not only do we eat pancakes on Shrove Tuesday/Fat Tuesday/Mardi Gras because they are a fat filled food that represent our final feast before fasting during lent begins, but also because in many places eggs are the food most often "given up" for Lent. So to get rid of all leftover eggs, you mix them with flour, yielding the classic crêpe. Therefore the children all go out in the street and throw eggs to symbolize the 40 days people used to go without eating any eggs at all.  So as I walked home through the Parisian cobblestone streets stew with runny yellow yolks mixed with the leftover rain collected between the stones, the smell of my least favorite food wafting up at me, I realized a place where even the food fights are symbolic really must be the place for me.