I’m excited to share this story from a wonderful old friend. I especially love it because I feel like the French – especially Parisians – tend to get a bad rap for being rude and unaccommodating. But having studied abroad there, I always found them to be kind and helpful, and this epitomizes the goodness of people everywhere.
“I had been backpacking through Europe with friends for 3 weeks. We were tired and ready to go home. We took a taxi to the airport in Paris. Side note – it took us over an hour to get a taxi, which didn’t help our moods at all! Our driver didn’t speak any English at all. We stop at a red light, and the driver turns around and says something to us (my 2 semesters of French were not useful here).
Then he LEAVES THE CAR and he goes into the market on the corner. The light turns green and people were honking at us and we had no idea what to do. We were freaking out that he just abandoned us. About 2 minutes later he returns with a Coke for all of us. It was when Coke was putting names on the cans. All of our cans said “pote,” which is “buddy” in French. Totally turned our day around and made an awesome memory!”
Big thanks to @trickynicky821 for sharing.
