Of all the places I’ve ever done gongfu tea, my very favorite is my uncle’s living room. A true tea connoisseur, he took a personal interest in educating me and my American partner about tea during our last visit to my hometown of Fuzhou.
And then again, I am ruining the Tea Road by being a complete coffee addict. Coffee is the fuel to a hard long day followed by a harder, longer night. Coffee is the cheap addiction to jumpstart mornings, to quicken afternoons, and to prolong midnights. The character of coffee is attitude, a swagger in which priorities have been predetermined.
Moving to Glasgow, Scotland for studies, the first thing I learned from one of my Scottish flatmate who is an artistic hound of the city was that there is no way you will drink from Starbucks or Costa around here if you visited Frida’s.
VIBRANT, ZEALOUS, RELENTLESS
That summer, since I have been postponing on seeing who’s Frida and how good is her coffee, I decided to grab a bus and see with my own eyes (and taste) this mystique coffee shop she’s been telling me about. And there I am, talking with Frida, just in front of the coffee store, not even entering the place, and things are just delightful from the beginning.
SHE OPENED UP THE TEA BOX AND MY EYES MUST HAVE LIT UP. SHE SAW I LIKED HER CHINA COLLECTION, AND SHE VERY MUCH LIKED THIS FACT.
She took pride in telling me how her mother keeps sending her different types and she asked me to choose the one we wanted. The first time I went with her favorite. The woman has some taste.
Thereafter I would simply say “Surprise me.” She hated it when I said that. That made me want to say it even more. I think I was in her room all of 10 times if that. Yet it all mattered so much.
Coffee is the fuel to a hard long day followed by a harder, longer night. Coffee is the cheap addiction to jumpstart mornings, to quicken afternoons, and to prolong midnights. The character of coffee is attitude, a swagger in which priorities have been predetermined.
I thought about this. Then I thought about my childhood. It turns out that I rode the bus to school nearly 200 days a year for more than 10 years. That’s 2,000 days. I don’t remember most of those days. They blur together.