Hate Life, Will Travel

The OB stands for “Oriental Brewery”. Another fine beer I picked up shopping at the “International” grocery store near my house. Has a nice blue can:

Beer can

The small text there reads, and this is exact:

Timeless enduring heritage, craftsmanship and new rice addition delivers refreshing smoothness and clean after taste, making OB the most drinkable beer

The can notes that Oriental Brewery’s been in business since 1933, so timeless… ummmm…

Anyway, it tastes like other rice beers. I’d have trouble picking it out from Bud in a lineup.

German in Germany
Fluency: long-broken college-level

There’s a comprehension line, where if they understood what I was saying, they’d just keep on going. If they didn’t, and they were young, they’d swap over to English. If they weren’t, and they didn’t, things got hairy. No one ever cared that I was speaking German either way.

Flemish in Belgium/Netherlands
Fluency: some traveler phrases, aided by knowledge of German

They were either delighted I tried or nice about figuring out what I meant. I frankly gave up, though, having already spent two weeks trying to speak German, after discovering that everyone spoke English.

French in France
Fluency: long, long-forgotten high school French, study

I was surprised at how nice Parisians were about French, to the point where they’d stop and talk to me about how to pronounce things. I felt like they were interested in having me speak French well.

…anyway.

Coffee in Europe has been pretty much crud so far. Bear with me for a second.

I agree with Coffee Geek in that there are two kinds of coffee: coffee-coffee and culinary coffee, for lack of better terms. One’s the sludgy, often drip, really bitter coffee many people like a cup of in the morning. I have a fondness for this myself. The other starts to include good beans, reasonably fresh roasts, and processes that do more for the flavor, like french press or espresso machines.

I think of this sometimes in terms of who sells what: 7-11′s pot of drip coffee is the coffee-coffee. Starbucks establishes the culinary coffee spectrum. People who want to pay 79c for a cup of joe don’t want what Starbucks is offering. People who want a decent latte don’t want to pay 79c for the other option.

In Germany and Belgium, it was all super-automatic machines. These are the beasts that have a hopper of beans on top and when the operator presses the button, they make a lot of noise and shake a little and a drink comes out the other end. They produce culinary coffee, of a sorts. On a scale where “1″ is “awful” and “10″ is “best I’ve ever had” the super-automatic machines, given decent beans, will consistently hit a 4, which is not bad at all. But getting beyond that requires better beans. And getting way beyond that requires better equipment, a lot more attention to the beans, a whole extra level of training and attention (and here I’m thinking of Cafe Vivace). But sometimes you get just wretched coffee and you have to be prepared for that — there’s a risk not present otherwise.

For most places, the super-auto is good enough. I had coffee a couple of times where it was pretty bad, but if you’re going to start serving espresso, a super-auto means almost no additional investment and you’re in business. But it’s not good culinary coffee, especially when they’re feeding it awful beans. It just means they’re checking off a box that says you offer lattes because you have x coffee with y steamed milk.

But when I got my first really good restaurant espresso here today, I wasn’t surprised when I checked it out and found they were using an old-school, semi-automatic machine. They’d have had to grind, tamp, and time the whole thing themselves. And the result was I got the first decent coffee in weeks.

Now this whole thing has an application to the Starbucks-McDonald’s thing, which I’ll get to soon.

Or not… Belgian beers are ridiculous.

I just got back from wandering around Munich, where I’d estimate I had several liters of delicious beer for approximately one euro, and on TV is the Simpsons… in German. It’s absolutely hilarious.

I’ll have a much longer account of this later, but I wanted to say this: I’m in Berlin, and I’ve been going through the layers of history: there’s a place I saw where Nazi basements were buried under the Berlin Wall, for instance.

Here’s my short point, though: I’ve read account after account about how the Nazis and then the Stasi harassed and tortured dissidents, and they’re things that the US currently employs. Against terrorism suspects, of course, but that was their justification too.

Germany, sixty years after the war, is still grappling with how to confront and acknowledge what happened during Nazi rule, and almost twenty years after East Germany essentially disintegrated, they’re openly stuggling with a set of much fresher wounds from a dictatorship of a different flavor.

We haven’t even stopped torturing people yet.

So, from Germany, I encourage everyone to go throw some money to stop this. Whatever your taste is: Amnesty International, Obama, whatever. This political season I’ve given until it hurts and every time I touch another memorial I feel like I didn’t give enough.