Kid in a Sweet Shop

In the third of this series of little windows on French culture… I just found a good sized supermarket. Up until now I had only found bakeries and small food shops in the centre of Marseille. An enforced move to a hotel on the outskirts landed me next door to the Casino. Consulting the dictionary Casino = casino… but I had been seeing Petite Casino around Marseille already (although they were all shut as it was a bank holiday), and now here is a Geant Casino, in reality comparable to Tesco Extra in the UK.

I guess I was like a kid in a sweet shop, or possibly a better description as a child exploring another child’s toy cupboard. Wide eyes, wandering around vacantly, you can’t find what you are used to, but there is this whole maze of lively items to choose from! Despite not drinking much at the moment I did have to wander down the wine aisle to see what I was missing out on at the moment. If my impressions based on the bottle are correct there are some rather nice bottles of Alsace white wine waiting to be sampled at €6-8 a piece, Montbarzillac at €8 and full bottles of Sauternes for €6-11… NOM!!!

Other things that caught my attention was the profusion of cheeses (fromage) and preserved sausages (Saucisson, take Choritzo and change the flavour a bit and you won’t be far wrong). Bread will never be the same as the UK, but there was a good selection of baguettes and other types of bread too, along with the expected Croissant, little tartlettes and sweet puddings. I was rather tempted. Yoghurt doesn’t appear to come in the large Onken/Yeo Valley size that it does at home. You can get little pots in all shapes and sizes or absolutely massive pots of plain yoghurt. There also appeared to be less in the way of fresh meat available too than the UK.

Excluding food products there were plenty of books and magazine for sale, but all appeared to be in French. For some reason I had expected a selection of both.. I recognised a number of authors, but in each case they had been translated. William and Kate – un bon amour (or something like that) and Clive Cussler stuck with me.

I’m sure there will be other observations that will come to mind over time, but these were my initial impressions of my first Geant Casino!