Se la vie
Life has a way of slapping you in the face just when you think everything is under control. During our stay in France, for the first time in our foreign travels there wasn’t a Starbucks. Whenever we saw a Starbucks, we asked ourselves why anyone would want to visit Starbucks when there so many good places to get coffee in Buenos Aires or Rome. In France, while there were many places to get coffee, if you wanted a croissant to go with it, it wasn’t so simple.
You needed to visit a boulangerie (bakery) and then take your croissant to the coffee shop. Since everyone (meaning the French) understands that there is no explanation provided to anyone else. You have to figure it out yourself. Somehow it never worked out so smoothly when we tried it. Once in while you would find a lunch type cafe where you could get coffee along with your sandwich or pastry but these were not the norm. Now that I reflect on our French experience it is clear why it wasn’t until we visit France that we missed the Amercan ambience of Starbucks.
France being run by the French who seem to have the same marketing philosophy as Henry Ford who said that he’d be happy to supply cars to the public in any color they wanted – so long as it was black. The French long ago convinced themselves that they had mastered all aspects of life and needed no further changes. They would be happy to provide excellent customer service so long as the customers undersood that their wishes were irrational and irrelevant if they didn’t conform to French conventions.
Fini
We very soon discovered that there is no lunch after 2:00. We would walk into a restaurant. The staff would look at us like we were lost and confused. Exercising my limited French I would say hopefully, ‘Mange.’ ‘Fini’ they would tell us and turn away. At first we weren’t paying attention to the time but gradually we realized that lunch was over at 2:00 and that there were no exceptions or qualifications.
We never ate dinner out so never learned when we might be allowed to eat that meal but the 2:00 lunch limit left us frustrated many times. The French are polite but uncompromising. They will never compromise their standards in favor of yours. We enjoyed our trip but never experienced the joy of having anything in France, our way.
One other mishap caused us to visit another American icon – Mc Donalds. Our comfort and security was compromised during the stay at our second apartment – where we had carelessly failed to notice that there was no internet. This alone would have encouraged us all the more to seek out Starbucks- if only for the free wifi. Alas, the nearest Starbucks was at least 200 miles away.
We turned for solace to McDonalds, which proudly proclaimed on every signpost, Free Wifi. Being dependent on the internet to handle financial matters at home, keep track of credit card balances and make hotel reservations, we needed to visit McDonalds several times. This provided us the cover to see what our American company needed to adjust to succeed in France. We learned that McDonalds in France was not cheap, not really the kind of French cooking that you would write home about and like everything else in France, subtly alien.
The only two sandwiches from home were the Big Mac and Filet of Fish. They were just like home at about twice the price. The other sandwiches were hamburger varriations but not the ones from home. The biggest surprise was that there wasn’t a milkshake to be had. There was a sundae thing for which I can’t remember the name and the McFlurry which I guess is somewhat shakelike. I must confess that I wasn’t the mood to enjoy the fine dining experience because my laptop refused to recognize the McDonalds network and without it’s handy dandy software to remember my passwords I was forced to use my wifes Ipad and painfully struggle to recover all the passwords that I didn’t remember. We spent hours in Mickey Dee’s but those arn’t hours that I want to remember.
One Sunday we were looking forward to a Big Breakfast or Egg McMuffin while taking care of internet business only to discover what we should have guessed. McDonalds in France don’t open for breakfast. The French wouldn’t be caught dead eating heavier than a croissant in the morning.
Still, McDonalds was there for me when I really needed then, allowing me to take care of business thousands of miles away from home while munching a Big Mac and sucking down a coke. What’s not to like? Still I don’t expect McDonalds to become part of our travel lifestyle.
