How Starbucks saves my life

It sucks to be by yourself. In Edinburgh. More so, by the Fringe festival.

But far away from everything, you do know there is a Starbucks round the cornr. Starbucks saves my life.

Oh! The green and the white, tucked in the Royal Mile, perfect TMobile wireless and a Grande Chai latte. America's way of saying "I love you".

Just the New York Times is the Times. But it feels good to be home.

It takes the Euro to be nostalgic about New York..

I am trans- Atlantic.

Even though sipping a Tall Caramel Macchiato in a Starbucks am Domkloster in Cologne doesn’t make it very pertinent that I have made the hop across the puddle.

What does make it very pertinent though is the 3. 70 € I paid for it.

Yes, it is easy to miss New York.

Bill Clinton in 1992 bid put it best when he said, “It’s about the economy, stupid.” And as much as Paul Krugman tells us that the economy is going down, whether President Bush’s stimulus plan works or not, the fact remains that the United States is the greatest economy in the planet.

And it is pretty blatant when a bottle of Mineral Water from the volcanoes of Auvergne, France Volvic costs less in New York than in Cologne.

But I would not be complaining. I have the greatest piece of Gothic architecture in the Kölner Dom outside my window. And even though the skies are grey and the weather every bit groggy it is what Europe always was and is going to be. Beautiful.

But another realization has struck me is that to understand things, you have to be there. As much as we celebrate the Euro, and yes, in a greater perspective European integration, we miss a little bit of perspective. And as I have been talking to a lot of people, in the airport and in the trains in the past few hours, one thing is explicit in its conformity.

The Euros isn't perfect, and it is bloody darn expensive.

Agreed, what would a barista at Starbucks know?

And either ways, the banks in Frankfurt would do fine. But why should a barista in Starbucks in Cologne pay up for economic growth in Bucharest.

But he does, whether he likes it or not. And that poses the greatest question on European integration. Who does it serve?

And yes, a decent flight could be run with a 757 Boeing. Continental just showed me that.

How a bottle of water could teach the Democrats a thing or two..

My life is such these days that I spend 3 $ on a bottle of water, and I don’t think of it as anything fancy. What matters to me that it’s Artesian, and it has all this wonderful Silica.

I am, obviously, talking about Fiji, bottled in an aquifer in a virgin ecosystem at the edge of a primitive rainforest, thousands of miles away from an industrialized continent.

I can’t think of 3 $ buying anything more in today’s world.

But also, Manhattan rubs in. Just the other day, I got a carton of Pure American, a generic Walgreen’s supermarket brand. It was ridiculously cheap, about 4 $ for a carton of twelve 500 ml bottles. Brimming with satisfaction from the coup I just pulled off, I got back home. And damn, did I know that a generic supermarket brand could put me through such ridicule from my roommate.

And since then, I taste Water.

3 $ Water Bottles are not what college kids do. But this is what I tell myself. In the Modern Bottled Water industry lays the possibilities of the modern world. With a flick of that debit card, you could be sipping water from artesian wells in St. Jana off the Adriatic Coast, or taste the exceptional purity of Icelandic Glacial Water, or have a touch of chic with New York’s own Fred, or have Volvic that has the crisp finish of ancient volcanoes of the Auvergne in France.

And yes, if you still believe that water is nothing but two atoms of Hydrogen and one of Oxygen getting together and doing their thing, you might want to try the Crystal Geyser they sell at Starbucks. You might as well not drink water.

But with all this water business, the Democrats better get their positions on Globalization straight, if the recent bickering between Clinton and Obama on NAFTA was anything to go by. If artesian water from Fiji could be gurgling my mouth right now, Globalization is here to stay.