I once sat next to a family from our local car dealer commercials in a restaurant and they spent the entire time talking about their recent trip to Paris. The whole conversation was about how the food wasn't American enough and the cable at the hotel didn't have their shows. Nothing about sights or culture or experiences.
When we went to Cancun (Isla Mujeres, actually) all the food was Americanized or just seafood. Our bartender at this little beach hut bar thingy became a good friend (still in touch, nearly 10 years later) and he heard my brother and I complaining that all the food was super Americanized.
He told us to rent a car and he would take us to the most authentic Mexican food in the world... So we rented a car, and dude drove us over an hour away to his abuelas, and she cooked us food, and it was the best food I had ever had. Incredible.
That's really frustrating in a way that speaks to my own personal experience. I once went to a sushi restaurant, and their mac 'n cheese was not very good. They didn't even have ketchup.
I don't know. When I'm forced to go to Paris on my mandatory annual vacation, I keep a framed photo of my boss and coworkers on the nightstand to stare at wistfully while wondering what I'm missing out on. I also have a gaming app called "Sim Accounting" so I can have fun pretending to fill out forms and spreadsheets so I don't get bored. Looking out of the hotel window, I feel kinda bad for the poor Parisians. They don't know the pride of having a neatly manicured lawn under the close scrutiny of an HOA or the excitement of maintaining, insuring, registering, and driving a large 8-seat SUV. When I think of all the fun I've had navigating traffic on the highway and downtown on the way to the office, I feel a little pang of regret that these French people might never know that joy. I wonder if we did the right thing. Maybe if we had stayed longer in Europe at the end of the war, we could have helped them remodel their cities with proper highways, suburbs, and strip malls. Nonetheless, the past is the past. I'm here for nearly two weeks. At least it will teach me to appreciate home more, if nothing else.
My favorite experience in Paris was going around and buying items for a picnic and having it on the lawn in front of the Eiffel Tower at sunset, it was amazing.
Many of them think that the US invented pizza, so…
You’ve got to get past the whole “if it’s not American (Or rather, what they’re used to…) it shit” as well.
When I was a kid my dad took me skiing to Sauze d'Oulx, there was this “hole in the wall” type place that did slices of rectangular pizza on a piece of card…I’ll never eat pizza, or food in general, that tasted like that ever again.