Souvenirs - special notes - Giftshop Paris Bookshop Jean-Thomas Cullen

QuickTOC: Giftshop Introduction 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 Giftshop

About Paris Giftshop Notes by Jean-Thomas Cullen

10. French Bread in Las Vegas, Post Cards, & More

I would never dissuade you from the special joy of buying a keepsake in a far away place. At the same time, I urge you to plan ahead, look twice, and be practical. Maybe for some readers, sending postcards (with genuine postmarks) would be optimal, and ordering genuinely made gifts by Parisian retailers online (like my Amazon or similar affiliates) would make sense. Your call. That's my plug for thinking about the online buying opportunities presented by my giftshop as an affiliate of Amazon and potentially other online services working with French (and not French, but nice) retailers.

Next are two random notes sprinkled in with the overall theme, which is to go prepared, travel smart, buy light, buy right, and get home in one piece with a lot of wonderful stories (and a few trinkets) to share (and send postcards). My driving point in emphasizing the strong and weak points of both the U.S. and Europe is to point out that nobody is really superior to anyone. We all have a fair amount to learn, and a fair amount to teach. I even put in a plug for the folks in Bucksnort, TN—did your notice?

About French Bread in the USA. I've mentioned that most U.S. folks still only understand bread as what the Germans call Papp (cardboard). That said, I found a few reluctant votes allowing for the edibility of toasted sliced white 'bread' in Europe. I mean come on, put your flag away, and realize: most of them don't have a clue what a real steak is, and most of us in the USA have never tasted real crusty bread with that farm oven goodness. Consider: a standard item in every European kitchen is a sort of mallet covered with teeth, for beating shoeleather meat into a semblance of delicacy before cooking. The US has only one major competitor on the beef front, and that's Argentina. I was once proudly given some English beef by a partisan proudly glowing and stating it was tender as a baby's cheek. I took one bite and couldn't eat anymore. My only thought was that I could put shoelaces through it and wear it on a 10k marathon.

This story may be the ultimate kicker illustrating our lostness on the topic of bread. The story no doubt also reflects that lost world in the age of Jerry Lewis, Dean Martin, and the rest of the Rat Pack. My late father, a dedicated gambler around Las Vegas and other spots around the world like Paris and Monaco (which is why I don't gamble) used to tell about the perks that Las Vegas casinos made available to high rollers to keep them spending money and feeling special or pampered. Among those perks was a daily plane load of fresh bread, baked in Paris, flown to the United States every night to be eaten in Las Vegas during early and mid-day (probably on the Concorde, I would imagine, which could make the Paris-New York run in a little over four hours; and the rest of the way by X-15 or space shuttle).

TOP