In 1981, I went to Spain with my school for a ten day tour. While we were there, a classmate named Annette was obsessed with getting a pair of shoes that she could say were from Spain. At every stop, she skipped the souvenir shops and headed straight for any shoe shops she could find.
In the end, she found a gorgeous pair of tan low heeled shoes.
In 1982, I signed up to do another school tour. This time, it was to London, Paris and Amsterdam. Annette couldn’t go but the moment she found out I had signed on, she hunted me down, gave me $50 and asked me to get her a pair of shoes from France. She gave me her size and wrote down the colours and styles that she was looking for. She wanted a pair of shoes that screamed France the way her Spanish shoes screamed Spain.
No problem, I said. I found exactly what she was looking for my first day in Paris at a shop just off the Champs-Élysées. They were light blue with a little rose decoration on the clasp.
They screamed France to me.
Annette loved them. From the moment I opened the box, she squealed like a sixteen-year old girl who has just been handed a pair of shoes from France.
She gushed and thanked me over and over. She couldn’t wait to show off her French shoes.
Then she turned them over.
Written in a circle around the shoe size were the words “Made in Spain.”
😀