When is a Casino not a Casino?

Well, in Paris of course!! The other day we were beginning a neighborhood market/walking tour in the south of Paris. The market was nice, but very small with only four stalls of nice produce which included some Marabella plums from Nancy, France. The plums are yummy and sweet and make a delightful liqueur which we sampled when we visited Nancy last year.

Right in front of the market was the entrance to the Casino Supermarket. It truly is a supermarket in all ways….big with a large variety of foods, wines, flowers, breads, etc. It takes up about half of the ground floor of the building that it is in….described below.




As we walked through the store Don found a true “prize” for him…a jar of pickled hot peppers. They are paprika peppers instead of the jalapeño ones that he usually buys. I think that they are pretty wicked looking but he swears that they are the best ever. The label says that they are a product of Turkey.

But even more interesting than the Casino store was the building that it was in. The bottom part is not a complete half circle, but is perhaps a quarter circle. On top of the first building is a second wavy one. It took a very creative architect to design this in such a way to make it stable, I should think.

Now if you can think of the prior building as 1/3 of a group of buildings built on a triangular plot of land, what would you put in the middle? Well, in Paris it is a park with playground equipment for the kids, park benches for the older citizens and some strolling paths, trees and flowers to finish it off. There are entrances to the park from all the buildings on the ground level and also an entrance for the general public at one end. The name of the park is The Grand Pavois. I translated the word and it means bulwark…a 15th century English word for “solid wall-like structure raised for defense”.

We couldn’t decide whether the park received its name for the buildings that it was tucked inside of, or because of its location on the south side of Paris. You can still see many remains of fortifications from Paris’s earlier history in this area.