WHAT’S IN A CAFÉ?

Whenever I travel to, study in, or expatriate to anywhere, I always bring along my keen curiosity about the café culture to these new places. Something about the moods of the architectural and interior designs of individual cafes coming together to fuse motif and soul into unified, yet scattered, themes illustrates a story about the residents of a place.

When I arrived in Palmerston North, I did the same. I stepped into different café nooks to sip and sample and, over several months, discovered something truly unique. As with any city, Palmerston North boasts a café culture with a distinct flavour, but I also discovered that these cafes are in a class entirely of their own. However, their individuality, as I decided, cannot be encapsulated in the way designs rendezvous with the owner’s signature creativity, but in something else.  

While living in California from 2006 to 2007, the city of Berkeley (a university city in the California North Bay) was a favourite destination to which to abscond. The avid displays of locally-owned and corporate cafés presented a bric-brac of refined, upscale demeanour, exemplified by the Peet’s Coffee, alternating with the grungier, more approachable venues of the Guerilla Café and Fertile Grounds Coffee. Nowhere is this eclectic mix more represented than on Shattuck Avenue, the congested four-lane street that runs east to west through downtown Berkeley. Over the years since 2006, the resurgence of independent, alternative coffee houses pulls this busy street back to the period when Berkeley was swathed in beatniks and hippies. 

As a former student turned lifer in the Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts, I was always drawn to Amherst for its vibrant pedestrian traffic, New England quaintness, and plethora of cafés. In this town, coffee houses change owners frequently, with transients buying and selling as they come and (in the same breath) move on to other, greener pastures. Save for the ubiquitous Starbucks, the small owner is the stable force in this tiny economy. Coffee houses reinvigorate old buildings by reusing and transforming historical spaces into vibrant entrepôts of conversations and study groups. Organic and fair trade coffee are the mainstay here, ranging from the politically correct traders, who have a more regional distribution in the US, the hybrid USAID organic coffee with a national distribution, to the conventional Fair Trade with an international distribution.     

The flavours emanating from the physical attributes of coffee houses are sometimes as subtle as the hint of the aromatic richness of pressed, grounded beans being poured into clean, white coffee cups. What distinguishes the café culture in Palmerston North from the others is not conveyed so much in the outward appearances of the café, but in the subtle gestures accentuating the basic Americano and accompanying baked good that arrives at the table. The coffee houses in Berkeley and Amherst offer the usual array of coffee styles - brewed, cappuccino, lattés - and baked goods sold à la carte, which sit in metal baskets behind glass display cases from where customers may eye and choose. While this set up may be present in Palmerston North cafés, when orders arrive at your table, they come alive with an artistic flair unrivalled by any in the US. The surface of steaming mugs of hot chocolate come dusted with chocolate powder, laced with chocolate syrup, and accompanied by two, nickel-sized pink and brown sweets. An Americano is served with a tepid side of freshly whipped cream, and a raspberry crisp garnished with a gentle ladle of smooth, plain yoghurt. These personal touches add fun and festivity to the café experience in New Zealand, exposing me to something distinctly Kiwi. Perhaps someone reading this blog in the US may feel inspired to create a menu, which borrows from this unique Kiwi style, and introduce it to American café aficionada/os?

PERPLEXING ENCOUNTERS

From behind, a series of hard, purposeful raps came crashing down on my head. An unexpected attack, I was both surprised and blinded by the viciousness of it, and by the fact that it happened at all.

*                *                      *

The view of the sun was inaccessible to me as I rounded the corner and sauntered along the bike path, which skirmishes parallel to Fitzherbert Avenue, from the city centre to Massey. Blinding rays of light, spreading expansively across the dairy paddocks, intimated that the sun was just overhead. I deduced that the time was almost high noon, but without a watch I could not be sure. I was heading to the office in the Geography Building, where I work almost daily on my thesis, after an early morning excursion into the city centre.

Bright rays signified warmth, but on this day, Palmerston North was overtaken by a chill that had crept overnight onto the southern tip of the north island. The chill in the late morning air betrayed what the white rays seemed to imply: a warm sunny day.

As I rounded the corner just over the peaceful Manawatu River, I marvelled at the serenity characterizing the ambience of this exact location, a discrete spot along the semi-busy highway. It is one of my favourites out of all the ones along the walking routes I normally take for my daily walking exercises. A cascading cliff of bushy vegetation, which implies the existence of residential life on the other side, exists to the left of this spot. Meanwhile, the ambience of this spot is spoiled occasionally by the lone cyclist cruising along on the part of the path reserved for them, and frequently by the panoply of cars zipping past as they round the curve.

On this day, however, the serenity of this excursion is betrayed by the aggressive pedestrian, who came at me from behind. After wrenching free from my attacker’s tight grasp, with some effort I stepped to my left onto a grassy patch, a gesture intended also to relinquish the path to the attacker, where seconds before I had treaded, untethered to any overwhelming worries.  

I glanced to my right, a reflex reaction to movement just over my shoulder, and noticed that this person was not in fact a pedestrian, but a cyclist. I took note of the gait of this person and the touring bike she forcefully manoeuvred back onto the bike path. An expert hop onto the bike seat and off she went, as if accosting me was an item on her to do list for the morning.

The lone witness to this attack is a somewhat tall, grey-haired, paunchy man, someone I did not recognize, who disentangled himself from his bicycle to ask with a hint of concern in his tone, “Are you all right?”

Hours later, she came to my office door, asking for a moment in her office. The purposeful, almost manly stride viewed from behind, struck a chord; the touring bike leaned up against the wall triggered a red flag. “Does that look familiar?” she asked me, as if to prod for a clear, visual memory of that incident in the late morning.

She offered me the seat facing her computer and posed the most perplexing enquiry: “What are you doing here?”  Several small gestures, but one second after her enquiry, it occurred to me that I had taken the wrong turn.