Coffee and Beer

Yesterday I went out for coffee in the late afternoon.  The coffee shop was easy to find, this is a European city after all.  The coffee menu took some work.  Coffee was listed in three sizes pott, tasse, and another size I don’t recall.  The waitress spoke some English and said that these were small, medium, and large, and that the pott was the medium (they were not listed in order it turned out).   The pott cost 2,60 € (I’ve found that the “€” actually goes at the end).  I looked to see if they had an Americano (which for anyone who is not familiar is a sort of watered down espresso – still decently strong – like the espresso made in a stovetop espresso pot rather than an espresso maker), but they did not; I wasn’t looking forward to a plain black coffee but I didn’t really want any of the specialty types listed (the Germans generally seem to write their coffee names in Italian too).  It turned out that what I got was more like what I wanted than I expected.  It was basically not too strong espresso (sort of like an Americano but with the crema) in a cup the size that you’d get with a set of dishes (“pott” is translated “pot” in the books but apparently means a large by German standards cup), a tasse must be the size of a small tea cup.  I don’t think I’ll be buying a lot of it though because that was nearly $4.00 for a cup of coffee and it’s exactly the same price as a 1/2 liter of beer at Schenkerla.

After this I went back to my room and a short while later met up with CPT Hanna (the first American I’d seen to speak to since Friday) who showed me around the area and showed me where a couple of other breweries are located.  I then went to Schlenkerla to get some brats, I really wish I’d gotten a shoulder or at least a ham hock.  The brats were not enough.  I noticed some people looking my way, it may just be self-consciousness but I thnk they were looking at the way I was eating, that I was switching my knife and fork back and forth and they were holding their knives in their right hands and their forks in their left hands.

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