A form of alien civilisation has finally landed in Paris - unfamiliar green and black signs have appeared on the Avenue de L'Opera.
It is the first Starbucks cafe to boldly go where no Starbucks has gone before, onto potentially hostile French territory.
Its advertising posters on the Champs Elysee announce \"Starbucks - a passion pour le cafe\".
But is the company aware of the risk it is taking by challenging the very birthplace of cafe society?
\"I think every time we come into a new market we do it with a great sense of respect, a great deal of interest in how that cafe society has developed over time,\" Bill O'Shea of Starbucks says.
\"We recognise there is a huge history here of cafe society and we have every confidence we can enjoy, augment and join in that passion.\"
And he may be right. Despite some sniffiness in the French press, some younger French are expressing their excitement that they will finally be able to visit the kind of cafe they love to watch on the US TV series Friends.
In fact, for some, it is an exotic rarity, far more exciting than the average French cafe. Melissa, aged 18, says she can hardly wait: \"I love Starbucks caramel coffee - it's very good and I like the concept that they're opening in Paris. I think Starbucks will be OK for French people.\"
An American tourist is equally excited when she spots the sign - this could be just the thing to help her get over the occasional twinge of homesickness.
\"I love the French cafes, but Starbucks is so popular in the States and it's become part of American culture and now it's come to France, and that's OK,\" she said.
But that is the problem for many French, who do not want France to be just like the rest of the world: with standardised disposal cups of coffee - identical in 7,000 branches around the world - even if they are termed handcrafted beverages.
At the traditional cafes, customers worry that the big US coffee house chains could drive out small, family-owned cafes.
Others here think they could come round to the idea of Starbucks, though for them it would never replace the corner cafe or the typical Parisian petit noir coffee .
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2. The beauty industry
The one American industry unaffeted by the general depression of trade is the beauty industry. American women continue to spend on their faces and bodies as much as they spent before the coming of the slump--about three million pounds a week. These facts and figures are 'official', and can be accepted as being substantially true.
The modern cult of beauty is not exclusively a function of wealth. If it were, then the personal appearance industries would have been as hit by the trade depression as any other business. But, as we have seen, they have not suffered．Women are retrenching on other things than their faces.
Women, it is obvious, are freer than in the past. Freer not only to perform the generally unenviable social functions hithero reserved to the male, but also freer to exercise the more pleasing, feminine privilege of being attractive. The fortunes are made justly by face-cream manufacturers and beauty-specialists, by the sellers of rubber reducing-belts and massage machines, by the patentees of hair-lotions and the authors of books on the culture of the abdomen.
It is a success in so far as more women retain their youthful appearance to a greater age than in the past. The Portrait of the Artist's Mother will come to be almost indisinguishable, at future picture shows, from the Portrai of the Artist's Daughter. The success is part due to skin foods and injections of paraffin-wax, facial surgery, mud baths, and paint, and in part due to impoved health. So for some people, the campaign for more beauty is also a compaign for more health. Beauty that is merely the artificial shadow of these symptoms of heslth is intrinsically of poorer quality than the genuine article. Still, it is a sufficiently good imitation to be sometimes mistakable for the real thing. Every middle-in-come preson can afford the cosmetic apparatus and more knowledge of the way in which real herlth can be achieved is being universally aced upon. When that happy moment comes, will every woman be beautiful-as beautiful, at any rate, as the natural shape of her features? The answer is apparent: No,for real beauty is as much an affair of the inner as of the outer self.
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3. X-Sports
Rick Stevenson, 16 years old, spends every minute he can on the mountain. He and his friends go snow-boarding every weekend. “It's incredible,” he says. “The winds are so strong, the boards go 50 miles an hour.” His friend Laura Fields agrees. “No one goes skiing anymore,” she says.“That’s for the old folks.”
Rick and Laura are part of a new trend in sports. It has its own language, words such as “rage,” “juice,” and “energy.” It has its own clothing, such as skin-tight bicycle suits in rainbow colors or baggy tops and pants. And it’s not for the old or the easily frightened. Its philosophy is to get as close to the edge as possible. And more and more young athletes are taking part in these risky, daredevil activities called “extreme sports,” or “X-sports.” In the past, young athletes would play hockey or baseball. Today, they want risk and excitement—the closer to the edge the better. They snowboard over cliffs and mountain-bike down steep mountains. They wind-surf near hurricanes, go white-water rafting through rapids, and bungy-jump from towers.Extreme sports started as an alternative to more expensive sports.
A city kid who didn’t have the money to buy expensive sports equipment could get a skateboard and have fun. But now it has become a whole new area of sports, with specialized equipment and high levels of skill.
There’s even a special Olympics for extreme sports, called the Winter X-Games, which includes snow mountain biking and ice climbing. An Extreme Games competition is held each summer in Rhode Island. It features sports such as sky surfing, where people jump from airplanes with surfboards attached to their feet. What makes extreme sports so popular?
“People love the thrill,” says Murray Nussbaum, who sells sports equipment. \"City people want to be outdoors on the weekend and do something challenging. The new equipment is so much better that people can take more risks without getting hurt.” An athlete adds, “Sure there’s a risk, but that’s part of the appeal. Once you go mountain biking or snowboarding, it’s impossible to go back to bike riding or skiing. It’s just too boring.”
Extreme sports are certainly not for everyone. Most people still prefer to play baseball or basketball or watch sports on TV. But extreme sports are definitely gaining in popularity. “These sports are fresh and exciting. It’s the wave of the future. The potential is huge,” says Nussbaum.
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4. Holiday Headache
All I wanted was a cozy log cabin in the state of Maine, somewhere deep in the woods, to hang out under the stars. It was to be my first vacation with my boyfriend, and I wanted it to be perfect.
So rather than waste money on a guidebook that was bound to be outdated before it appeared on the shelves of my local bookstore, I decided to search online. Little did I know that when I typed the words “Maine log cabin rental”at altavista.com, I was stepping into 48 hours of Internet hell. Forget dinner, forget work, forget sleep. I was glued to my computer for hours clicking from one listing to another to find the perfect hideaway.
I was wrong. The first site that I tried, cyberrentals.com, grouped rentals by region but had no map to tell me where such romantic-sounding, places as Seal Cove or Owl’s Head were. So I had to log on to mapblast.com to locate each one, then return to slogging through listings.Another site, vacationspot.com, let me find 50 cabins and cottages right off, but most of the rentals turned out to be closed for the winter.
I learned only after reading a lot of fine print. One day and hundreds of listings later, I was ready to throw my computer out the window. For every 10 vacation spots I looked into, I found maybe one that sounded good and more often than not, it was booked, too far away, or outrageously priced. Searching on line was really giving me a headache.I finally decided to put our log-cabin Web dreams on hold and search the old-fashioned way at a bookstore. I bought a paperback book called America’s Favorite Inns, B&Bs, and Small Hotels. I was relieved to see that each city was neatly pinpointed on a detailed map, and most had good descriptions to help me figure out where in Maine we should go in the first place.
Then I found it: an old inn on the southern coast of Maine that rented us one of its best rooms for $100 a night. Guess what? It didn’t have a Website. I took my chances based on a good review, a great location and a bargain price. It wasn’t a log cabin, and it was far from the woods, but there were lace curtains, a hardwood floor and a quilt on the bed. With the ocean outside our window and a fireplace in the room, my holiday was just as cozy as I dreamed it would be.
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5. Arthritis all-clear for high heels
Fears that wearing high-heeled shoes could lead to knee arthritis are unfounded,say researchers.
But being overweight,smoking,and having a previous knee injury does increase the risk,the team from Oxford Brookes Universtity found.
They looked at more than 100 women aged between 50 and 70 waiting for knee surgery, and found that choice of shoes was not a factor
The study was published in the Journal of Epidemilology and public health. More than 2% of the population aged over 55 suffers extreme pain as a result of osteoarthrits of the knee.
The condition is twice as common in 65-year-old women as it is in men of the same age. Women's and men's knees are not biologically different, so the reserachers wanted to find out why twice as many women as men develop osteoarthritis in the joint. Some researchers have speculated tha high-heeled shoes maybe to blame.
The women in the study were quizzed on details of their height and weight when they left school, between 36 and 40 and between 51 and 55.
They were asked about injuries, their jobs, smoking and use of contraceptive hormones. Howere, while many of these factors were linked to an increased risk over the years was not.
The researchers wrote:\"Most of the women had been exposed to high heeled shoes over the years-nevertheless, a consistent finding was a reduced risk of osteoarthritis of the knee.
There was an even more pronounced link between regular dancing in three-inch heels and a reduced risk of knee problems.
The researchers described this finding as \"surprising\a larger-scale study to overturn their findings
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6. Disney World
Disney World, Florida, is the biggest amusement resort in the world. It covers 24.4 thousand acres, and is twice the size of Manhattan. It was opened on October 1 1971, five years after Walt Disney’s death, and it is a larger, slightly more ambitious version of Disneyland near Los Angeles.
Foreigners tend to associate Walt Disney with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and with his other famous cartoon characters, Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck.
There is very little that could be called vulgar in Disney World. It attracts people of most tastes and most income groups, and people of all ages, from toddlers to grandpas. There are two expensive hotels, a golf course, forest trails for horseback riding and rivers for canoeing. But the central attraction of the resort is the Magic Kingdom.
Between the huge parking lots and the Magic Kingdom lies a broad artificial lake. In the distance rise the towers of Cinderella’s Castle. Even getting to the Magic Kingdom is quite an adventure. You have a choice of transportation. You can either cross the lake on a replica of a Mississippi paddlewheeler, or you can glide around the shore in a streamlined monorail train.
When you reach the terminal, you walk straight into a little square which faces Main Street. Main Street is late 19th century. There are modern shops inside the buildings, but all the facades are of the period. There are hanging baskets full of red and white flowers, and there is no traffic except a horse-drawn streetcar and an ancient double-decker bus. Yet as you walk through the Magic Kingdom, you are actually walking on top of a network of underground roads. This is how the shops, restaurants and all other material needs of the Magic Kingdom are invisibly supplied.
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