Thought Picnic: No stars for my coffee and no bucks for the WiFi

Starbucks to the rescue

For free wireless internet connectivity at the price of a coffee with strange names [tall, grande or venti] pretending to trendiness at Starbucks you can surf.

I usually have a café latte grande which in simple English is a medium-sized coffee with frothy milk, but it felt strange seeing the coffee being made.

Now, I have had student doctors gather round my bed, even had some sit in on consultations either with my medical consultant or for intimate topics of discussion without thinking much about it as long as they are not poking me with things or making the calls.

The taste of trainee coffee

It is the first time I have had an apprentice barista [not barrister at law for a vendor at a coffee bar] prepare my coffee as she was instructed through each step of making the coffee.

You could see she was not a dab hand that my coffee was in danger of coming short of the Starbucks quality I had grown accustomed to; there was not enough frothy milk to fill my mug that the instructor had to step in.

She might with time become such an expert able to train other baristas in making the Starbucks menu of coffee-bean offerings but I would have liked a little subtlety in the instruction.

Just ask

For a café full of people who I thought were using the free WiFi, I found out it was down, the jinx of my hotel seemed to be following me, but when I asked, the guys in the café switched it on and we were all able to surf for free.

I cannot be the most forward and assertive person around, I guess people just looked for alternatives rather than ask and that might be because they had their coffees in take-away paper cups rather than in a china mug as I always have mine.

Why ask?

This only lasted so long before the WiFi service became unusable in two Starbucks cafés around Chatelet des Halles that it was better to find a seat inside Forum des Halles for the free WiFi connection.

Where an annoying prick took exception to people taking pictures in the mall where he might have inadvertently appeared in their pictures after being the most irritating nuisance on the phone beside me. He was just about walked out of the place by security – Good riddance.

To think in one Starbucks café I only had to click on a button to connect and in another hardly 300 metres away I filled in a form to guard against terrorism just short of divulging my sexual preferences and blood type – I’ll rather be rescued by something freer than what Starbucks has to offer of over-priced coffee and a fraction of a carrot cake compared to what I will get in Germany going for literally twice the price. Daylight robbery!

In the shadow of Mount Fuji

A new class of coffee

A journey of sorts as one waits for the train which gives just about 90 minutes to while away the time but not enough to do anything substantial.

Starbucks Coffee with a carrot cake and a blueberry muffin perhaps but the ever-friendly and helpful porter suggested the Café Royale on the 1^st floor, high ceilings, gilded gargoyles and 1830 just to tell you that it has been around for quite a while.

For location, Starbucks is a dreary, conventional template of dark colours and trendiness pretending to class, here, I get real bone china for a teacup and saucer with a silver spoon, not a mug and a wooden spatula – even the traditional does matter.

To Nippon with names

So, I collected my luggage and made for the platform, my name is sometimes mistaken for Japanese and there we were, a troop of Japanese tourists with their trunks, portmanteaus and suitcases, whatever happened to those humongous large Japanese-brand cameras, not one in sight – very strange.

The train was running late, they found out it would be 5 minutes late just 2 minutes before it arrived and then the train formation was reversed – I could not understand why an international train platform and announcement stuck to French and Flemish only – stubborn Belgian pride sometimes comes across as parochial – though I very well understood what was being said from the sound system that drowned out its original output with reverberating echoes. New station, rotten audio.

As we made for our coaches, the Japanese began genuflecting to each other, the guide as obsequious as could be sick-making, all that bowing and deference – we need to get on the train, for crying out loud.

Times have changed

You could see the hierarchies, the seniority, the juniors remaining standing until the seniors were settled, it all looked so colonial, the power-distance index showing a gulf as wide as to be unhealthy for genuine mentoring or leadership in the 21^st Century. That kind of society thrives within its own indigenous setting but one wonders about it when teleported to multicultural settings well away from home.

Then my reserved seat – a mess, just like the last time – whilst the stewardess might have been a bit miffed, it was only right for me to ask that the rubbish be cleared away just as one would expect of a table in a restaurant that was brimming with patrons.

I would suppose the Japanese are getting off at the airport having stripped Antwerp of its diamonds, well, the times of that kind of excess – the Japanese acquiring masters and valuable antiques of note – have probably gone but then this blog would be online before I find out.

Should be home in an hour, I think, as I glimpse the lives of those in whose backyard looms Mount Fuji.

Scanning Starbucks' Napkins

The name sells coffee

As I changed trains on Sunday, I had a 30 minute stopover at Duisburg and decided to get a coffee.

Of all the coffee shops in the station, I had seen a Starbucks Coffee sign on the platform which was 70 metres away – I was willing to drag my baggage and self all the way to the global giant in a German city railway station.

Not so much for the coffee but for the fact that they do muffins – the muffins are not perfect, there are times I have looked at the muffins and thought I was in some biohazard laboratory with fungal spores cultivated on the surface of the muffins.

But ignore the eyes and mind, go for the taste and all will be well. I hate chocolate in my muffins, in fact, I only do blueberry muffins and when hard pressed vanilla or banana.

I’ve been silly

Too many choices of coffee and as I remembered the Undercover Economist, I realised I had been fleeced the moment I walked into the café, I was suckered and the fool in me was about to be parted from my money.

I ordered a Caffe Mocha Grande from the wall menu which according to Page 35 of my copy of the Undercover Economist with embellishments translates to - I want a cappuccino, mix that with hot chocolate; I feel special - and then make that big by adding water and milk; I feel greedy - and top it with whipped cream; I feel piggily gluttonous. Then charge me over twice the price of a regular coffee.

Did I also get a lemon cake too? My waistline is getting strained already.

I settled in a corner to down my coffee, muffin and cake and as I wiped my mouth of the crumbs, I noticed my napkin had one of those green messages that is supposed to make you feel concerned whilst delivering nothing in reality.

Annoying napkin

The napkin was made from 100% recycled fibres using a bleach-free process, one can be glad for that but the other messages took away from my satisfaction with the snack.

I could not say if it was the More plants, More planet. STARBUCKS COFFEE or the Less napkins, More plants, More planet that annoyed me more as a message that was a non-message; though if contrived enough, it could mean we all depart for the moon.

Similar to the message to save the trees as the paper is friction and pressure heated to bind the toner as you stand by the laser printer ready to pick up your essential printouts.

The trees have already been felled, that is why it is already paper in the laser printer – For crying out loud.

So, here I was in Duisburg, Germany using recycled paper to wipe my mouth and then noticing that the napkin was manufactured in the Netherlands; it would had have to be transported from somewhere in the Netherlands – so much for recycling and the carbon footprint of transportation.

Less Schmaltz, More muffin, More Coffee – I say.