Coffee

After coming back from Austria, I have numerous nights without good sleep and need to begin each day with coffee. What, you might ask, is wrong with having coffee? The irony is that I had just returned from Austria, a country with great passion for coffee culture.

Most coffee aficionados know this. When ordering a cup of the brown stuff in Austria, a "coffee, please" doesn't suffice. You will find dozen of coffee variations in a decent Kaffeehaus (coffee house), where ordering simply "coffee" can never impress the waiters who take pride in their coffee variety. True, I won't forget the aroma of the Maria Theresia coffee. For amateur coffee drinker like me, nevertheless, I can't understand all the fuss.

"The more exposure people have to higher-quality coffee", my sage mentor once said, "the less willing they'll be to experience anything else." He is certainly right. People walking barefoot in poverty will never know how big a loss that would be for them to be denied the luxury of (nonexistent or unheard-of) Mercedes-Benz. To that end, I leave the Seven-Eleven, self-satisfied with a can of down-to-earth Nescafe coffee in my hand.