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This will be the first of I'm sure many _mouthfuls_ about coffee. Because I love coffee.
I did not always love coffee, though, as probably is true for every human. The aroma of coffee is nice (even my daughter enjoys it...our family just likes smelling things, I think...), but the taste of black coffee is intense for a child.
My first memorable experiences with coffee are from middle school. One summer, my friend's mom loaded up an old old RV full of a bunch of rowdy, horny, delinquent teenagers and drove to the Redwoods. If you don't know anything about California, let me tell you. Where I'm from, in the foothills of the Central Valley, it is "hot as fuck" in the summer. The northern coast of California, however, is a temperate rainforest of Sequoias, ferns, and MOSS. The beaches are vast, and the sound of the crashing waves absorbs all other noises.
The point is, it feels nice to appear on the coast and be cozy in a sweater and pants. For some reason, on this particular trip, our possee of like seven pubescent boys got the idea to drink coffee in this drizzly, mild climate.
We were camping in the yard of our friend's sister, and we would occassionally walk down the road to a gas station that sold shitty coffee, and more importantly, shitty coffee flavoring. It was basically a buffett of syrups you could add to your coffee to make it less like coffee and more like candy. This made perfect sense to us teenagers. We quickly became connoisseurs of this diabeetus syrum, concocting all combinations of French™ vanilla, mocha, caramel, malt, toffee, etc. And the beauty of this was that we could go to town and mix up the most decadent of dessert coffees imaginable, and it would only cost us a little over a buck. So we indulged.
Apart from this little episode, however, I never drank coffee at all. It was a freak thing we did on this little road trip. It wan't until highschool when I first got my driver's license that I had any interest in (candy) coffee again.
I had gotten my license, but my truck was a stick, which I could barely drive at the time. My friend's brother, who lived in Berkeley had gotten his license suspended and needed someone to drive him back down to the bay. So after having my license for a few days I got a crash course in driving a stick PLUS! bonus city driving EXP points. It was intense. I remember the brother sleeping in the backseat as I was barrelling down the freeway, and he suddenly sits up and says, "hey, what gear are you in?" I popped it into neutral and then into overdrive, realizing I was doing 75 in third gear for...way too many miles. "I was in fifth..."
If you don't know anything about the Bay (San Francisco Bay), let me tell you. It's a lot like the northern California coast, but drier. It is foggy and cool and sunny...pretty much year round. Coming from the oven that is the CV foothils, it's very cozy. So here we were again, taken by the romance and charm of the coastal atmosphere.
We were staying with the brother, but he disallowed us to stay at his place while he was at work. So we just roamed the streets. We decided to walk from Berkeley into Oakland, where we found a place selling coconut cappuccinos. And that got me started on sweet coffee again. I remember on the way popping into a guitar shop that was...how do I put this...it was like someone opened up to roof and dumped a pile of guitars in. It was a fucking mess of guitars and guitar shit...just in a pile, and some enormous man sitting there tuning one.
In college, worked at an afterschool program at an elemetary school. I'd get off around six and sometimes head to my friend's house, who was an enthusiastic new barrista at Starbucks. He made me a PINT, a fucking PINT of black coffee one night like it was nothing. To me, it was putrid, and I refused to drink it. But not too long after this, I came to Korea for the first time and first started drinking coffee for real...sort of.
You don't see them as much as you used to, but in 2009, instant coffee and tea vending machines were all over the place. For ₩ 500 you could get a little paper cup of shitty coffee, brown rice green tea, or Job's tears tea. I ate that shit up. All of it. There was a machine in the lobby of the dorms where I was staying on my first exchange, and being that we were always partying there, I came to appreciate a little pick-me-up before class.
What's funny about this too, is I actually worked on campus as a barrista for a time. I don't think I ever made or sold anything though. It was in an "English Lounge," where people would come to chat with foreigners, and that's pretty much all I did: flirt and shoot the shit. But I would mix myself up some coffees and things while I was in there, because usually I was hungover or tired from being up too late being a rowdy twenty-something.
It wasn't until my next exchange to Korea two years later that I discovered coffee for real. But that chapter deserves its own post.
[To be continued...]
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