10,000 Words Part 45: Continental

Beatrice and Marek sit in a faux-French patisserie eating an English approximation of a continental breakfast.
They smile at one another over the sugar packets. The French food here isn’t a patch on the French food back home.
(Back home is Riga, back home is Ljubljana. They’ve never been to each other’s back home. Yet they share a nostalgia for better pastries, another approximation of Gallic sophistication that somehow seemed more real.)
The waiter, channeling Maurice Chevalier by way of Warsaw, drops the accent, grins self-consciously.
Old ladies tut into their frothy coffees. Where are all these foreigners flocking from?