Where (Almost) Everyone Knows Your Name

I had to get up at 4 a.m. this morning so that I could be in the office for a 4:30 conference call with colleagues back in the U.S. I don't usually go to such great lengths to make phone calls, but one of my former students was proposing her Master's thesis, and I was invited to take part. Anyway, when the meeting was done two hours later, I went home and resumed our normal morning routine: V. leaving for work at 7 and me taking care of Will until I dropped him off at daycare at 9. So, by the time I got back to the office, I was starting to feel sluggish after 5 hours of activity.

What a pleasure it was then to go to my favourite coffee shop on the UQ campus (Bar Merlo, at the library) to get my daily cup of flat white. Ordering a cup of coffee there involves giving your name to the clerk who writes it down on the cup's lid. When the barista is ready with your coffee, he or she calls your name out. After several months of being a regular customer, however, most of the staff now know my name. They are always quite friendly, and a few even call me "hon" (even though they are in their 20s), which makes me feel like I'm back in Georgia. There has been only one other time in my life where food service staff got to know my name--more than 12 years ago, when Patty and I used to go to the Crown City Brewery in Pasadena, California nearly every weekend (I miss the lavosh), and we always got our favourite waitress. It's such a small thing knowing a customer's name, but it works on me on every time.

"Norm!"

(that's a reference to an old TV show, for you young readers out there).

Give Me a Cuppa!

From The Age (the best newspaper in Australia, in my opinion), comes a story about perhaps the world's most expensive cup of coffee:

But Hervey's Range Heritage Tea Rooms located at the top of the Hervey Range, west of Townsville, now has a $50 cup of coffee on the menu.

The rare Kopi Luwak beans that make the expensive brew are retrieved from the droppings of the Luwak, a cat-like member of the civet family which is found in the jungles of Indonesia.

Tea room owner Allan Sharpe said the Luwaks eat the ripe coffee cherries, but the inner bean is not digested, meaning they can be retrieved from the animal's droppings.

The beans, which are then washed and given only a light roast so as to not destroy the complex flavours - cost $1250 per kilogram.

If you can get past the thought of drinking something extracted from animal droppings, the taste of the coffee is actually quite sweet and smooth.

I wonder how that would taste in a Starbucks Mocha...

Brisbane, Here We Come!

It's official! We are moving to Brisbane, Australia this summer. In case you have never moved to another country before (like my wife has), you need to know that there is a freaking huge amount of things to do:
-sell the house in 3 months
-sell nearly everything we own, as we don't have much of a budget to move things
-get rid of nearly all the electrical appliances
-apply for visas (which begins with fingerprinting and FBI background checks)
-get quotes from different international moving companies
-figure out how to transfer money and maintain U.S. accounts after we leave
-get our cat ready for the quarantine process
-enjoying our last chances of eating good Tex-Mex (but looking forward to an abundance of excellent Indian food)
-telling everyone we know that we are going to the other side of the planet, and then waving them all goodbye
and trying to "smell the roses" along the way.
Oh my!!

*I took the picture above in Oct 2006 from a cafe in South Bank, along the Brisbane river. Australia is incredibly caffeine-friendly...