Day 36 – I hate coffee, but…

I think anyone who has met me once, has faced my cappuccino addiction. I am always the coffee girl that screams from a mile away that she needs it and can’t live without it. I am the kind of girl that goes to aperitivos and orders cappuccino instead of  alcohol. I always say yes, whenever someone asks me out for coffee and I am the first one to get in line when an espresso machine is around. What not many people know is that I actually hate coffee and I can’t stand the smell or drink it if it doesn’t have a tone of milk in it. I never have coffee when I wake up in the morning and most of the times you can’t find any in our house.  I’m weird, I know.

When I was a kid, my mom used to ask me to make her morning coffee, because I made it so good and strong. As far as I know she could have used that as a false pretext, only to see the glitter in my eyes, because her asking me, made me feel important and more grown-up; or maybe she was enjoying my coffee, giving the fact that I was also asked by many house guests to make a pot for them too. One of the clearest memory that I have from back then, is that I loved the smell. I would inhale it and tried to keep it with me as a memory, for as long as I could. I couldn’t say why that pleasure disappeared and I began hating the smell of coffee but I am sure that it happened about the time I moved here (which is even weirder).

Anyway, where I come from, coffee is not the same thing as in Italy. For us it’s a social thing and when you ask someone for coffee it means you need to talk and enjoy their company for an hour or so. That’s another thing: we think of coffee as an extension of time. We can never drink it in less than an hour and you can’t buy a second one and have it with the same person, because it would be like wasting time and words. If you really must have a second one, that means the person in front of you is special (right about now my friends are wondering if I ever had a second one with them; hahaha funny).

Why does all this matter? Well because unlike the Italians, I take my coffee time very serious and I am really happy when I can share that time with people I love. Today I had my coffee with my one and a half year old, daughter. I bought her a cup of foamed milk and a roll and we sat at the terrace enjoying each other’s company. She was telling me some kind of story in her own Chinese language and I was listening and asking questions, being intrigued by the characters. It doesn’t even matter how the rest of my day was, because this morning made my whole day and the feeling got stuck with me until now.