99% of My Blood is Cappuccino

Of course I am exaggerating. But if you drink three cups of cappuccino a day, you’d feel like you can’t live without it anymore.

I am a late bloomer when it comes to coffee drinking. It is probably because nobody in my family wontedly drank coffee. Or that I never tasted a good one until I came to Italy. And it did not help that I learned in elementary school that coffee contains caffeine – that awful stuff that was supposed to kill you young. God, did I hate that ink-like beverage.

But I had a metanoia in 2002 when I began studying in Italy. My first cup converted me at once and all the negative biases of my childhood was shuttered. It was a July morning when Michel, a French classmate, invited me to a bar during the routine 15-minute break from our Italian language lessons. At first it looked unimpressively small – the cup was only slightly bigger than a jigger. And it looked fairly simple to prepare it. The barman took some freshly ground coffee granules from a small grinding machine and inserted a spoonful into an electronic coffee maker that looked like a giant bread toaster. A minute later the barista deftly poured frothy milk and a dash of chocolate powder over it. He handed it to me nonchalantly, as if I was the millionth customer of the day. I added two sachets of sugar – Michel’s suggestion – then stirred it like I was God creating tsunami-grade whirlpools in the Pacific Ocean. The sugar slowly descended as coffee and latte became one, yet the cream formed again after the sugar was stirred. The cream was particularly dense and had a gorgeous light brown color. Like a suspicious monkey, I first looked at my cup from every imaginable angle, smelled its aroma, and hesitantly took my first sip.

The feeling was like that of a first kiss – you’d want more but you’re afraid to spoil its firstness. The taste was persistent. In fact it tasted better than it looked. It was a good cappuccino and it was a moment of real pleasure for me. From that day on, my mornings became caffeinated rituals.

Image source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dominicspics/2756648951/