Exiting the metro on the wrong side of the avenue, heading back to your hotel after a shopping excursion, you pass by an old woman carrying a delicious-smelling baguette. You are instantly jealous and look around, only to discover a boulangerie a few paces away. Voila! So you go into the shop and, after poking around, see a nice pile of small baguettes next to the register, which makes it easy for you to say, “un baguette,” to the proprietor, in your best I-don’t-know-French accent. Only after paying do you discover that—voila!—your baguette is piping hot and quite wonderful. “Buerre?” you ask the shopkeeper, who directs you to a shop around the corner, where you buy a stick of butter, which by your estimation is only about a bajillion times more tasty than the Breakstone’s in your fridge at home.
And off you head for your hotel, mashing hunks of hot baguette into a partially unwrapped stick of butter, pleasantly ignorant that your joy trumps the fact that no self-respecting Parisian would be so reckless, because you don’t want to miss a single moment of freshness and bakery perfection, one that is somehow unequivocally better for its location.
This, dearest reader, is Paris. And it’s not even dinner time.