The trip was wonderful. We went to London for history and Paris for food. London was fantastic and Paris more so. Partly because my wife’s cousin and her boyfriend are both architects in Paris (he’s a native) and they showed us around places that were (to use Matt’s words) really Frenchy. Places we would have never seen otherwise.
This is a business blog, not a travel blog, but in the next few posts I’ll share some of my impressions of both here.
The Starbucks incident. Dee drinks a lot of tea and the best in the US is at Starbucks. Why? they make the water hot enough – how hard is that? Surprisingly she found better tea in Paris (and many more high end tea houses) than in London. Mariage Freres has the most amazing selection of teas I’ve ever seen. Literally hundreds. I knew of black tea, green tea and even white tea. They also had red teas and blue teas. For a tea-totaler (get it?) like me they offered tea ice cream – 3 scoops, each one a different tea flavored ice cream. You don’t see that a Baskin Robbins.
Mariage Freres is obviously not Starbucks. Ignoring the milkshakes being marketed as coffee (which I won’t get into) Starbucks is the McDonalds of tea. I mean that only in a good way – you can find it almost everywhere and the product is consistent. So we stopped into a few when she wanted a dependable, cheap (what costs $1.50 in the US cost $3 – $4 in Paris but it was cheaper than the others) drink of tea.
In one Starbucks we ran into a trio of Americans. The first commented as we walked in, “That woman” referring to Dee, “is American but I don’t know why I know that”. Her friend replied, “It’s her bag”. Thus giving Dee a chance to discuss her theory that Amercians abroad can be indentified by their Vera Bradley hand bags. Apparently no one has snapped up the international Vera Bradley franchise. But the man in the trio asked “Aren’t you thrilled to find a Starbucks?”
Thrilled by a Starbucks? In Paris? What’s wrong with this picture? I was thrilled to eat sausage and cheese on a baguette so crusty it cut the roof of my mouth. Thrilled to drink wine in a place with casks lining the wall where you could bring an empty wine bottle and have them fill it for you, and where even the waitress smoked in the no smoking section. I was thrilled even to pay 25 euros ($32 -yipes!) for scallops that were sautéed and seasoned to a perfection I’d only imagined. Thrilled to see an open air market with chickens in a butcher case with their heads and feet still attached right next to animal organs I could barely identify – hearts, kidneys (or was that liver?) and would never buy. I was even more thrilled to see that the rotisserie next to that case contained a small pig on a spit (take that Boston Market!) some of which I did buy. It was superb. If I could be thrilled by finding a Starbucks in Paris, I would have stayed home.
Isn’t the point of travel to broaden yourself? To see things you don’t see at the mall? And I don’t mean in the sense of going abroad to “see the freaks”, and comment on how unusual these foreign places are. What if instead, you traveled to see how freaky we can be? To understand why someone would think it strange to buy a chicken without a head and feet attached? To try to figure out how people who create and appreciate the most exquisite perfumes in the world would reject an air conditioned restaurant and prefer to eat outdoors at café tables just inches away from smelly traffic on a sidewalk that smells like piss?
Takeaways:
- Go to Paris to eat. Really. (And drink tea if that’s your thing)
- Don’t make the business mistake of thinking all your customers are like you. Or that the ones who aren’t are weird. Your job is to get into their heads and figure out what they want – even before they know that’s what they want.
