Sunday Morning in Search of Coffee

Or Please – Just a God Damned Cup of Coffee!

I am very pleased with myself. I can now get angry in Spanish. I didn’t think I could do it, since usually I get so frustrated I can’t speak in any language. Actually
 I thought I was doing really well this morning. I stayed in the room showering etc while Gene went to Starbucks to use their internet. By the time I got there, he was still busy, so I went wandering off to figure out where to have coffee. As expected just about every place was closed on Sunday morning, but I found one little café open near my favorite Donatello’s. I met Gene back at Starbucks and we walked around to see if there was any place we liked better but found nothing open, so we went back to my newly discovered hole-in-the-wall. I am now feeling really proud of myself because I have done all this walking about and haven’t even had my first cup of coffee yet. And I am in a good mood!
First the strange young woman in charge insists that we must sit inside underneath the television, rather than outside in the patio where life is good. She takes our order for two cafes con leche and two huevos fritos con pan (fried eggs with bread) each, informing us that no, they can’t toast the bread. Oh, well, we’ll live. I’m still, believe it or not, in a good mood! But then the only other customer in the place, an old man drinking beer, apparently in an attempt to please us, turns the tv to CNN in English and turns the volume up. I can’t take it so say that I am going outside on the patio whether she likes it or not. And if she doesn’t like it, she can refuse to serve me. This does not seem to disturb her and shortly thereafter she brings us two tall glasses of hot milk and one foil packet of instant coffee granules. It is now 11:30 in the morning and my good mood is sinking fast, but I decide that since this is not the first time that this strange coffee thing has happened, apparently there are things about the coffee culture that I do not understand, and that, as a foreigner, I should probably be a little more tolerant than I am feeling at the moment. So I move both glasses of the offending hot milk to the edge of the table, along with the disgusting foil package of dirt, not saying a work of objection, but making it perfectly clear that I certainly have no intentions of putting any of it into my body. Shortly thereafter, we are each served 2 fried egg sandwiches. Two fairly nice rolls on a plate with a fairly recently cooked fried egg inside. Each. Not really bad. Not really what we had expected. We each transferred one of our eggs onto the roll with the other egg, thus making a two-egg sandwich on a roll. Not too bad actually. Eating the eggs, with part of the roll, took the edge off of whatever it was that I was feeling. Now approaches the waitress. Do we not like the café con leche, she wants to know. I can’t take it anymore. I have lost my determination to be culturally sensitive. “No es café con leche,” says the foreign blond bitch. “Es leche para bebes con polvo de piedra.” [It’s not coffee with milk. It’s milk for babies with powdered stone} Later I think there was probably a much better way tos ay this. The waitress looks shocked and offers me a “café pasado.” I have seen this phrase before and it positively mystifies me. Sounds like yesterday’s coffee to me. I ask her if this is what it is and she brings a pyrex coffee pot with some very vile old-looking strong coffee in the bottom and offers to pour it into my baby’s milk! The beer-drinking man has now appeared to try to help and is trying to offer me a different type of instant coffee, while trying to tell her what he thinks is bothering me. She is getting mad. I ask how much we owe her. We pay and leave. The beer-drinking man catches up with us in the alley and tells us that Rincon Chami around the corner (one of our favorite places anyhow) will serve us a real cup of coffee. We walk over there. They do. All is well. I am happy. It is 12:30.