The coffee story

It has been a pretty hectic week here!  Lots of last minute stressing about the run on Sunday along with my usual stuff has kept me pretty busy.  However, I feel like I need to be sort of on top of doing these posts since I have so much to catch up on!  I have been thinking of how to best recap some of our early Sydney memories… I just figured I would start off some of my posts with these little gems of stories for everyone’s entertainment J (Also with some random photos, like my little/quite large spider friend here)

Moving on to my random story. Those who know me understand my coffee obsession… change that… coffee addiction.  Really though, it is the first thing I grab in the morning.  I don’t do anything before I have a cup of coffee… sad, but true.  I have also converted the hubby to a coffee lover.

In Australia, I feel that I am viewed as a lowly American when it comes to coffee.  One of our first “Australia’d” moments came our first morning in Sydney.  We were dropped off at the hotel we were staying at for the first 2 weeks and promptly needed coffee.  Both the hubby and I are big coffee drinkers back home.  We have this amazing Bunn coffee maker we use in the states that brews essentially the full pot in like 3 minutes or something crazy.  Anyways, we were in need of our caffeine fix. 

Our driver had suggested the café just outside our hotel… how convenient for us we thought!  In hind site, we should have been prepared for the shock of everything as soon as I saw that a bowl of fruit with yogurt was something ridiculous like $14.  But, we were tired and didn’t really care at that point.  So the waitress comes over (probably just because we looked like tourists, as we know now most cafes are not full service like that) to take our order.  We order our food and both ask for a coffee.  The conversation continued a bit like this…

Waitress: What kind of coffee?

Me: Just a regular coffee is fine.

Waitress: But what kind of coffee do you want?

Me: Ummm… a black coffee with some milk?

Waitress: A short black or a long black?

Me: A long black?

It was far to early for this conversation.  We really had no idea what was going on at this point, so just went with it.  As soon as it came out and I tried it, I knew it was what we would call an Americano back in the states (espresso and hot water).  Very good, but a cup of coffee it is not. So they do not do “brewed coffee” as it is called it in Australia. Only lattes, cappuccinos, flat whites, long blacks etc.

Lesson learned. 

So anyone planning on a trip to Australia, be prepared for this more European attitude towards coffee… and stick with the flat white.

 Mmm the flat white.