coffeefog

Take a walk through any all-american mall on a saturday, and you'll see 1 million walking Starbucks ads. Watch as the mom pushing the stroller pulls a venti frappucino out of the stroller's cup holder. Does the baby get a cup holder? That part I'm unclear on. In my experience at least, you'll see a large portion of the shopping/walking public carrying coffee or other drink cups. You drink while you shop. I do it. Everybody does it - it's not just mom's I'm picking on. Nothing feels better than a starbucks drink in your right hand and the remote control for a massage chair in your left hand. It's the quintessential mall experience.

In Europe, however, they don't have a word for "to go." Actually, I guess they do. And Europe has a bunch of languages. In Spanish it's "para llevar," and in France, it's pointing at the paper cups. And I could even be wrong about the Spanish part - does that mean "to go" or "to wear"? Either way you can say it and more or less get what you want.

But in all honesty, people tend not to get their coffee to go in Europe. I stood on quite a few street corners in Barcelona and Paris, staring off into the crowds looking for paper cups, but to no avail. It's more of an experience that you sit down or stand at the bar in a cafe for. People take time out of their days to sit back and enjoy a coffee, rather than multi-tasking it into their days. Many cafes that I visited didn't even have paper cups.

One thing we do have in common is anti-Bush graffiti. That's one of the things you can get anywhere.