Starbucks comes to Buenos Aires

"Después de varias idas y venidas y todo tipo de rumores, la inauguración del primer local de Starbucks ya está confirmada para el próximo miércoles en el shopping Alto Palermo."

Yep, it should be fun to watch.

Porteños, being the great travelers that they are, know what Starbucks is, to a great degree. So there won't be any show there.

The real fun will be watching the expats gettin' what might be their first jolt in a long time from the Nipple-less, Navel-less Nerida of the North.

I'm reminded of something Maya Frost once wrote about a trip back to Yanquilandia after an extended period here. She was looking forward to some of the old country delicacies and Starbucks was way up on the list ...but the experience was not what she and her husband expected.

"How barbaric," I think was the way she put it, "to stand in line for coffee!" "Where's my waiter in his little uniform with his towel and tray?" "Where's my tiny agua-con-gas?" "¿Donde estan mis MASITAS, por el amor de Dios?"

When US soldiers returned from the first big yanqui involvement in Europe, after WWI, the popular question was "How ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm after they've seen Paris?"

I hope to be there in Alto Palermo on opening day to get some reactions from extranjeros that have been taking their coffee here for quite sometime, in the lap of a luxury that is all but prohibitively expensive for the 21st century US market...

...and maybe some reflections on what it's like for them to be again herded into a queue in order to get their jolt in a paper cup with a plastic lid.

Should make for an interesting story.