What a mess!

This is a short note about how coffee, and my quest to find proper coffee in China is expanding my cultural horizons.

At least one time every day, some times two, I will have a meal in the staff mess at the building we work in.  I have comped meals at restaurants nearby, but eating at a restaurant over and over again gets a little boring, not to mention that during the hours that we are taking our meals the restaurants are barren wastelands of empty tables and bored staff.  Because of this, you are continually being 'helped' and it gets a little obnoxious, so we opt to eat at the jam packed staff mess.  The food maybe a little more questionable, maybe mysterious is a better word for it, but it is loud and packed and has a good energy about the place, not to mention it is easy for a 'Handsome American' to make friends there.

Since the mess is cafeteria style, and busy, and nobody that works down there speaks a lick of English, we usually just follow suit.  We get in line, grab our red trays, and take little dishes of food from different 'lunch ladies' as we walk down the assembly line of mystery meats and strange 'green vegetables'.  Portions are pre-set for some items, like grilled chicken and cartilage skewers, but for other items such as tofu and mystery meat sausage, or cauliflower/broccoli stir fry you can take as much as you want.

Every time I walk into the mess, the cooks all chat among themselves, then serve me up on my own white tray, separate from everyone else.  They would heap a huge amount of rice on to the tray, and then load it up with so much food it would be impossible to eat half of it.  Then my buddy Deybis would follow behind me, and get a portion half the size that they gave me.  He would have to argue with the lunch ladies to get extra.  The staff reasoning was that I am huge, and American, and need lots of food.  (Deybis is Colombian  After a week of this debacle  and me throwing away and wasting a lot of food I convinced them that i can eat a normal amount, and that if I am hungry, I can come back and get more.  This was hard for the cooks to understand.

To get to the point, there is a crazy looking Chinese coffee machine down there that does not look like anything I have ever seen before.  I have been waiting to watch somebody use it first before I try my hand at it in front of two hundred watching people.  Trust me, I would be watched very closely, and as a expert coffee drinker I can not afford to screw up!

It was one of these days while I was eyeing the machine that I saw what appeared to be a giant glass container of drip coffee off to the right of the machine, somehow I had never seen it before.  Nobody was taking anything from it.  Strange.  I lie in wait like a Nile Crocodile...

Two days later, I have not seen anybody make espresso or take any of the drip coffee.  At this point, I can no longer control myself, and I grab a big cup and go to the drip coffee container, pull the tap filling up an entire cup.  There, that was easy!  And it was not a big deal, no problem.  I take the cup back to my table, where I take a big whiff.  Smells sweet, a lot of the coffee here is.  Dang, thought it would maybe be a nice dark roast...  I raise the cup to my lips, and take a gulp, it is scalding hot.

It was hot Coca-Cola with Ginger.

My disappointment was unbelievable!  I was sitting with Tiffany and Deybis as my world came crashing down around me.  They cheered me up, saying I could always go grab coffee at Starbucks.  "I don't wanna be the guy in China drinking Starbucks though..." I replied.  As a rule for myself, I always commit to two tries of food or drink.  This might be something I picked up off of a cooking television show, but it makes sense.  Sometimes the first taste is such a shock that you can not really get a good feel for what you are really experiencing.  I take another swig of the hot soda.  Actually, not bad.  Bubbly, hot like coffee... and spicy as hell because there was so much ginger in it.  As a matter of fact, I kind of like it.  It could never stand up to my expectations of the thick, dark, bean juice that I love and am naturally addicted to being from Seattle, but on its own this warm soda was okay.

Intrigued, I asked around.  "Henry", one of the guys from the gym informed me that it is a Chinese cold remedy to take hot Coca-Cola with lots of ginger.  Hmm, interesting - maybe that is why not that many people were drinking it, nobody was sick.  I would encourage anybody who is feeling under the weather to try this back home - it is actually pretty good.  Every day now when I enter the staff mess, the first thing I do is pour myself a large glass of this Coke - Tea.  Supposedly you can also buy it in a yellow Coke can around town...

M