I really love the part about choosing a cafe. That’s such a solo traveller thing! I’ve spent hours looking for the right cafe in Paris, the right pub in London, the right noodle bar in Shanghai… happy hours, mind you, but anxious hours, cause let’s face it, it’s hard charging into some place unfamiliar when you’re solo and especially when you don’t speak the language and especially especially when you’re so far from, for lack of a better concept, your home tribe. Total primal thing. Walking into a foreign camp unarmed. So you get really picky, look for a place where the tables aren’t pushed too close together, etc… and then you find the place that logically should be perfect but something says Nah… and it’s onward, belly rumbling, feet aching, and most importantly thoughts bubbling out of your scull and you’ve gotta find somewhere to camp out and get’em all down but it’s gotta be the RIGHT place… yeah?

keep it real,

Ah, the power of indoctrination.

This post made me think of an observation by an Italian columnist, Bepe Severgnini, who wrote, “McDonald’s cheeseburgers do not taste like cheeseburgers, rather they taste like McDonald cheesburgers.” Never underestimate the comfort and power of familiarity in this chaotic and unpredictable world.

A recent study found that infants could recognize corporate logos and their associated products before they knew numbers or letters. It is sad that they will think of the letter M as the one that looks like the McDonald’s sign.

As to the utopic cafe, you will never find it because it is different everyday. The best you can do is make the cafe you are in, the utopic one…even if it is the foreign/alien Starbucks. Actually the best coffee I have had recently was a delightfully creamy espresso at a bar in a Whole Foods store in Jersey.

And you know, this post made want a fish taco - one of the few things you can’t get in NY (at least a utopic one).

I appreciate the laugh. For those of you who weren’t there, Sparsh, Revaz, Revaz’s sister, and Revaz’s sister’s roomate where all looking for a good place to find a cup of coffee. The scenario wasn’t too far off from the third part of this post and it was driving Sparshles crazy. He started pulling out his hair as he’s prone to do.

He just couldn’t understand how a group of people could be so persnickety about where they drink their cup of joe when it took valuable time away from looking at beetles at the natural science museum. Worse, he found a girl who liked to look at beetles just as much as he does and we were taking valuable time away from his beetle date. Haha, what a memory.

Don’t worry about the podcast brother - soon it’ll be summer here in South America and it will once again make sense to release a podcast of summer music.

Rolando,

Starbucks in el Tec!! No me digas! Then again, I’m not really surprised … you do go to the bonafide universidad de fresas. May I recommend that you and your friends play ping pong instead of pool? It’s way more fun. And after a couple beers, ufff.

I think I definitely need to update the table of IP addresses-to-countries. Supposedly I was from Germany last night too.

Abo,

Dude, totally. I’m not part of the club either. I ask for a medium coffee or a double espresso and it’s always, “you mean grande” or, “you mean doppio?” The way they say it, it’s like they’re junior high bullies making fun of me for having a lisp.

Anyway, I think that your comment - as they tend to do - really summed up in one paragraph what took me about three pages to not quite get right. Well said hermano. You’re using Opera these days?

Its odd to me that you disparage having choices and options (if that is indeed what you are doing) because you seem to live in such a way as to maximize the choices available to you. At the same time, many of the choices I make are designed to keep options open in the future as well. Probably because my mom’s favorite admonition growing up was “don’t permanently close any doors,” by which she generally meant “get good grades and then if you don’t want to go to college, you can choose not to”. I think the most important thing is to be conscious of the fact that we have choices. Satre, if I remember from my limited undergraduate academic encounters, was concerned not just with the fact that humans have an infinite number of choices available to them, but more with the fact that people were generally unware or in denial of their own options. As you said, they make excuses to deny the fact that they had made a choice at all: “I had to cooperate with the Nazis or they would have killed me” is really just another way of saying “I chose to cooperate with the Nazis in order to save my own life”. While both statements amount to essentially the same thing, the latter statement is the more honest and healthy of the two. I think the surest way to unhappiness is to live in such a way as to deny that we had other options. Taking responsibility for our decisions is the first step to living an honest life.

We humans can judge options and quickly disregard them,… perhaps this kind of ‘fast judging’ is what we call ‘common sense’; you can’t teach common sense… in a way it is part of our ‘do not overthink’ mechanism that prevents our brain from ‘hanging’ or rather exploding.

The toughest choices to make regard food: at restaurantes, I find it difficult choosing filete a la tampiqueña or pescado al mojo de ajo. However, I’m very brand conscious, or rather monopoly conscious (I avoid ‘familiar’, big, businesses; I kind of think that the future of small businesses depends on me spending the money on them).

Btw, Starbucks is like the plague… it even found its way inside my college! WTF!

Oh well…

Going out is another interesting topic that can be hard when you have to make a choice…

I have a close group of friends, and when we gather at a friends house… we have a hard time finding something else to do than play billiard. We know that we’ll be perfectly happy playing pool forever and ever. Perhaps it is something we do because we know that everyone will be happy doing it.

And so, in a way,… I understand other people’s need to find a safe haven (standardization?) for trivial activities, like food… etc.