Apparently tourists are voting with their feet, and they're traveling increasingly to places other than Paris. The stereotype at least is that Parisian service providers are crabby, so unpleasant the Paris Tourism Board had 35,000 pamphlets distributed explaining how to behave towards tourists.
"The British liked to be called by their first names. The Japanese like to be reassured. The Spanish just want people to be nice. Americans are glued to their electronic devices and like to eat as early at 6 pm."
Paul Kappe, an owner of the renowned Brasserie de I'lsle Saint-Louis, perched behind the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, gave a Gallic shrug when he saw the brochure.
"In the United States", Mr. Kappe observed, "waiters can be fired at any time and must work for tips, so they have to be nice. In France, you can't just fire somebody if they're not doing a good job. If you could, everyone would be friendly."
Ummm....
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And apparently HRH Queen Elizabeth II is having a tough time making ends meet, too. The headline in today's paper read:
England: Queen's Swan Is Barbecued and Eaten
(Maybe I should go back and read the accompanying article?)
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On a more serious note, I recently watched an episode of Top Gear (British car show) where the guys drove some exotic convertibles around sunny Spain. The striking thing that was pointed out was how economically depressed things are there. You can read about it, but until you see it you can't really comprehend it.
Spain had a building boom just like we did in America, their bankers throwing money at builders and developers and unworthy borrowers while raking off Mucho Euros for themselves in the process. (Apparently we don't have a monopoly on crooked Banksters.) In some areas, as far as you can see, tens of thousands of unoccupied high-rise condos sit abandoned.
There was even a billion-Euro airport built, complete with a 15,000' runway (wildly excessive), that sits unused, rotting. And long stretches of roads equal to our Interstate highways are totally empty. There is no traffic.
The Spanish economy is in ruins. Overall unemployment is 25%....youth unemployment (<24 yrs) is 56%. It will take them years to pull out of this self-inflicted disaster. Kinda makes our mess here seem tame, doesn't it?
Q: And what have governments / regulators done to see to it that this can't happen again in the future? A: Almost nothing, here or there. And don't bother writing your Congressman to complain. They're probably on a junket somewhere with their sponsoring Bankster. (They can probably get a helluva deal in Spain. Just sayin'.)
S
