Nate Silver: Random, Pretentious Observations from Europe | Hacker News Reader

Nate Silver: Random, Pretentious Observations from Europe

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27 pointsrms19 comments

I was recently in Paris for a few weeks and I can say that:

- There was zero anti-Americanism and zero rudeness. People were very cool and especially nice once they heard the words San Francisco come out of my mouth.

- The food was great but it's difficult to find ethnic food in many parts of the city.

- Everybody loves Obama. They want to strike up a conversation with an American just to say "Obama".

- Vending machine coffee is quite good.

- Baguette/Brie at the gas station is better than what you'd find in most French restaurants/Boulangeries in the US.

- Paris reminded me in a lot of ways of a significantly more laid-back New York.

- The 6 euro wine in France was generally about comparable with $20-30 wine in the US. Not sure why.

A big difference I noticed.

Me: "In my day job, I'm a grad student/professor."

Paris: "Cool."

NY: "Oh. " [with mild distaste.]

Me: "But that's just my day job. My real work is the company I'm starting."

Paris: "Oh." [with mild distaste.]

NY: "Cool."

The women in France are also far less attractive than the ones in NYC. They seem to be under the impression that starvation/smoking + a nice purse is a substitute for jogging.

That's quite accurate. Prestige professions are valued more than creative/speculative/longshot ventures.

I did meet a random couple who had both worked in Silicon Valley -- but they seemed disappointed that I was doing a startup rather than working for one of the big firms.

"- Paris reminded me in a lot of ways of a significantly more laid-back New York."

Probably the most striking thing for me is the difference in cafe culture. In the urban US, cafes are filled with professors and grad students, telecommuters, realtors and programmers working on their computers or on paper, while in Paris (and most of europe) they are filled with people just hanging out. I actually feel uncomfortable working at cafes in France, similar to how I felt in the late 90s and early naughts in US coffee shops, often being the only person with a laptop before wifi took off.

"- The food was great but it's difficult to find ethnic food in many parts of the city."

Strangely, Nantes and Bordeaux have a more noticeable diversity of restaurants than Paris, from what I've seen. The two are actually better in this regard than anywhere but a handful of neighborhoods in the US, although there is still a much stronger emphasis on meat than in the US.

> - Baguette/Brie at the gas station is better than what you'd find in most French restaurants/Boulangeries in the US.

The gas station is not making the bread, they are buying it from a local bakery. Since there is a demand for good bread the random places like this can move enough inventory to get daily delivery, which keeps the bakery running, etc. Oddly enough, I found croissants in Paris to be uniformly mediocre. I can get the same level of quality without really trying here in the SF area and can get better than any I found in Paris by going to the company that supplies Thomas Keller. The best I have ever found were in small villages in Perigord (Belves FTW...)

I strongly prefer ethnic food and crave spicy food all the time, and so eating in Paris was more an exploratory exercise than a pilgrimage to the culinary city of my dreams.

The best bakeries I found were in Cassis on the ocean in southern France. There were 4 shops within about 100 feet of each other and they were all amazing. I attribute this mostly to intense competition, which is, I think, the same reason that SF restaurants are so good. If they're not good people walk a few steps further to the neighboring place.

If Paris reminds you of NYC, you probably drank way too much 6 euro wine...

Would you care to elaborate on that please? How's Paris like NYC? Seriously.

Well, I should qualify by saying that the thing I find most salient about NYC is the energy that people have -- which was not the same in Paris. But both are fundamentally large, densely urban, wealthy cities. People who live there are total city dwellers -- it would be feasible (and quite practical) not to own a car and to exist within a 4 block radius of your apartment.

A few years ago I was in London and found it nearly indistinguishable from New York, but Paris was strikingly similar too in some ways.

I would rather read what makes Paris different from NYC in your opinion. It would make for a much more interesting comment.

Ok. I'll mention a few notable things:

- People are more formal in the way they conduct themselves. They say "sir" and "maam" all the time to each other and there is generally an attitude of appropriateness and formality that is quite unlike anywhere I've been in the US.

- Taxis are mostly Mercedes Benz cars and they are driven by people who don't seem to really care all that much about the money earning aspect of the job.

- The cheapest wine in restaurants is usually terrible. In the US it's reliably mediocre but not terrible. The vaklue is in the 6 Euro bottles sold in stores.

Those are the most salient differences. It's really hard to think of any.

The best part of the trip was near the Sienne when a woman drew her son (who had been asking her questions) near her and asked me what kind of bird it was that was floating nearby. "A swan", I said.

"How does he know?" asked the boy.

It's great to see someone that young questioning authority.

Forgive me if I sound rude, but I have to think you weren't paying very close attention if the quality of cheap wine and the make of taxi were the most salient differences you noticed between Paris and New York. I find the two cities nothing alike and off the top of my head could think of about 40 more salient differences. The most salient being: in one of those cities everyone speaks French, and the other one... they do not.

So I guess the some of 40 others are the sun rises 6 hours sooner in Paris, Paris has only one river, the metro doesn't run 24 hours a day, etc.

He brought those things up because they were important to him. He didn't say anything about the amount of dog shit on the ground, you can't get anything to eat after 2pm except fastfood, or if you want good coffee go to Starbucks (yes, I said it!).

well the language thing is kind of obvious, isn't it? There are infinite differences, but the point of my initial remark about similarity to NYC was to highlight an intangible similarity that I noticed. It struck me because of how different the cities are.

One reason the wine stood out is b/c I had expected that perhaps a more wine-oriented culture would demand better wine at the bottom tier. This did seem to be true of bottled wine, but not of the watered down stuff served in most of the cafes.

Ha, I thought these were going to be observations from Europeans... Kudos to him for admitting that his own observations are random and pretentious.

"London, and the United Kingdom in general, has sort of become ground zero for what is known as libertarian paternalism"

In light of the other Orwell thread, it seems apropos to link to this classic essay of his:

http://langs.eserver.org/politics-english-language.txt

There is a respectable startup coming out of CMU pushing a more secure version of the credit card pins. They or one of their competitors will catch on soon enough in the USA.

They are already in Canada, as is just about everything else in the article (rotting teeth on cigarette packs, waiters with portable credit/debit terminals). I had the sense not of USA vs. Europe but USA vs. everywhere else in the world.

The article also felt a little naiive to me, but in a completely understandable way, I'm not about to expect someone to know how cigarette packets, credit cards, restaurants, touristy areas, etc. work around the world.

He probably would have been either annoyed or appalled by the anti-credit nature of Germany. In Munich, at least, non-touristy venues did not accept credit circa 2006.

That's still common. You can't pay with a credit card in most of Germany for most things. Don't expect it unless you're at a nice restaurant, most grocery stores don't take them, bars don't, certainly not at convenience stores and the like.

I can't decide which I prefer. I tend towards convenience, but there's also some comfort in knowing that everything that I've ever bought isn't tracked back to me.

In contrast on my last trip to the US I had $20 in my wallet when I arrived and I never had to get cash in the week that I was there.

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