Christmas Vienna – close and personal

When I wrote about the Viennese coffee in Rousse, I did not have even a clue that I will drink it soon in its original version and original location. But that’s the best thing about life – unexpected things happen. And all we have to do is look for them and accept them as they come!



So I went to Vienna with two goals – to see Gustav Klimt’s paintings and drink punsch at a Christmas market in Vienna (these markets are called Christkindlmarkt which seems too long a word but very sweet once you get used to the sound of it).
I did visited three exhibitions of Klimt and 5-6 Christmas markets as you can see on the picture above. The orange punsch was great although prepared with artificial essences and not with real orange fruits.

But I really couldn’t miss the chance to taste a cup of real Viennese coffee. As far as I could see there were two major types of preparation – espresso with whipped cream and coffee mélange. There is the whipped cream one.
I did taste that at the Kunsthistorisches Museum café among great statues and rich secession arches after I’ve climbed the staircase painted by Klimt himself (I tell you, it’s incredible!).

Then I checked the mélange at two places – the Demel Bakery and a nameless café in the Kunsthalle building where many young artists gather for a nice chat in a cosy place. Here are the Demel mélange and cakes.

Conclusion is – it’s up to the place and personal taste. Melange is lighter and smoother for drinking. But the whipped cream café made me feel somehow special with that white curved top sneaking beyond the edge of the cup. And the cakes and strudels were great all around Viena ;-)

New way. New life.

Sometimes we need to change something in the everyday routine just in order to feel alive. This could be our way to work, or the type of clothes we chose to wear today, or the thoughts we chose to start the day with. I've tried with the thoughts and it worked... for about a month. I'll tell you another time about that. Now I'm trying to start my day without coffee. That doesn't mean I am not a coffee fan anymore. I just try to live without it so that I enjoy it more. As much as I used to enjoy it before I started drinking three cups a day between e-mail checking, quarrels at the office, and excel sheets browsing... I wanted to re-invent the pleasure of its taste, to remember how it was when I touched it for the first time. Also, that helped me find new tastes in life - those of different types of tea. When we are over with something old, we always find something new to replace it. Like these:


And I can tell you, it worked surprisingly well. I felt shockingly well :-) Shocking was my first morning without coffee when I realised I am still alive after not having it for a couple of hours after waking up! Long live the fresh tea!

My record was 7 days without a morning cup of coffee and 5 days without coffee at all. Now it's over, but I will try to not drink coffee whenever possible so that I don't get used to it... As ADF sang once: new way, new life :-)

Memento amore*

It’s been quite a while since I haven’t written anything here, but it is summer time in Bulgaria – get it? I prefer to enjoy the café places with friends more than writing about them at home alone. But it would be really a sin to miss mentioning that one – Memento, my favourite place for this summer.

Although it is located at the corner of two busy streets in the ideal centre of Sofia, the feeling you get when seated there is as if you are at a seaside bar, or even, at a seaside bar on a Greek island. I’ve read an interview with the owner and this feeling was confirmed as it appeared that he is from Crete. So the guy has just managed to bring the same air of freshness and leisure to the noisy and relatively dirty centre of Sofia.

He tried it twice in fact, as there are two Mementos in Sofia, but I prefer the one on the crossroad of Gurko Str. and Rakovski Str. Even the trash containers on the street are not an obstacle to the nice view as they are fenced with some branded metallic cover with cute golden fish on it. Sorry, I didn’t take a picture of it, but look at their cappuccino (this one is grande, taste is very mild - the best coffee I’ve tasted recently! ) and tables , and flowers. And not as expensive as those at Costa and Starbucks, sorry, guys – Memento coffee is better and plus, you’re getting it served, not self-served!

And I loved the blue chairs hanging from the large tree above the café which were recently removed for some reason!

The inside rooms are very well designed and I guess they will be great and cozy in winter evenings – I will test them in October-November, you bet! And also, they offer a tea menu with quite a lot of choices. I went once with a friend who says the masala tea prepared at Paper cake is better… but as they have all other tea types in Memento except for masala, we couldn’t compare ;-) Oh, dear, I miss the feeling of that evening when I even declined a last-minute offer to go for free to the Sting concert in town (can you imagine? ) as it was sooo nice just to stay there and talk and relax…

And it is a great crowded lively place to go at a Friday night after a terrible day and a week and have 3 drinks and get pleasantly drunk with a couple of friends, hunting men and greeting life as it comes. So I have my great day and night memories from Memento, get your own if you like to!

*Hopefully, in Italian this could be read as a word play of ‘Remember love’ and ‘Love Memento’

Bio coffee - no, bio sweets - yes, yes, yes!

Finally, I had the chance to taste a real bio coffee, produced according all the requirements for coffee to be licensed as bio (or at least, I guess it is according to them as it was prepared in a specialized bio shop). It was a pleasant experience to taste the coffee as there was a corner for drinks outdoors at the event I was attending, the weather in Sofia was beautiful that day and all the people were in good mood although they were trapped to spend the wonderful Saturday indoors staring at the stage or at the screen of their smartphones twitting questions to the speakers....

The coffee wasn't quite good, I should say, although with loads of milk added... It tasted as if prepared from sugar beet or something :-( Traditional (non-bio???) coffee won the match!

And don't ask me what the little thing beside the cup is - it was made of paper, very nicely designed, a small stone and a garlic inside - to keep us safe from the wind and the flu, probably ;-)
But the amazing thing were the sweets we were given to serve ourselves with....Wow! A woman owning a guest-house in a village somewhere in the Rila mountain has prepared them for us - the unknown guests of the event she was a speaker at. Thank you, Deshka!

Those were tasty amazing things - four types, but I liked most two of them: one made of pumpkin (the yellow ones at your left), and the other which looked as small meatballs steeped in sugar syrup which dripped all around (the brown ones at the right) and everybody's fingers were sticky with it, hankies were the most wanted good around... But it was funny, and nice, and - most importantly! - tasty in the old-fashioned home-made way :-)

Back to Viennese: city and coffee

It's been a while as I have last written about drinks and cafeteria. But here is the inspiration I needed - I visited a city I love and moreover, I visited it accompanied by the right people, in the right time. 'No, it's not Vienna', a friend called the album of pictures showing in a creative way some of the best building in Ruse. Yes, it's not - it's even better because of the warm, friendly and relaxed feeling you get when walking around. No posing, no stiff-upper lip, but still very aristocratic. See here for yourself.

But let me tell you about coffee drinking there. For many year now, the speciality in the Ruse cafeteria was the so called 'Viennese coffee' - espresso with cream on it and cocoa powder on the top. Now I notice this otherwise obligatory part of the menu in each cafeteria and restaurant has been at some places replaced by the so 'modern' moccaccino, late, etc... The thing closest to Viennese was the so called coffee con pana. Ok, I respect the different languages but I'd really prefer to have back my good old Viennese coffee, which I remember from my school years - looks more or less that that (couldn't find a more exact picture):

After some arguments on choosing the best place to sit our choice for the first day was a cafe (and a curious fast food place) on the main pedestrian street - Planet Food. After an exhausting sightseeing tour the fresh coffee, great indoor design and many people around was what we needed. But we god a bonus - how I love nice surprises! - home-made lemonade, correct proportion of sugar, lemon and orange juice and water, price - twice as cheaper as it would have been in Sofia. We couldn't believe it, some of us had two glasses:-)

On the second day we visited a cafe/restaurant which offered us a green garden on the roof, relatively good quality coffee, great pizza and poor sandwiches :(


The place offered as a bonus an interesting view towards the backs and roofs of some major old buildings in the city centre and a couple of small waterfalls in the garden. So it was worth seeing it. All of it, all of Ruse :-)

The choice to be loved

It just happens - one suddenly wakes up and realizes that games are of no interest any longer when it comes to relations with the opposite sex. Or meets somebody and realizes the same. Loving and yearning for somebody's attention and touch is important emotion for our being human, for our motivation to go on... but being loved and cared about is as important for our overall balance. And I dare say this applies both for men and women.
Is it about selfishness? Hell, no! It's about realizing that we are valuable, it's about somebody showing us we're valuable by gentle unexpected care shown in surprising ways and situations. It's about being happy and calm, it's about being loved and choosing to be loved, and realizing that we deserve it. Also, it's about the surprise that arouses inside when we find out all these things in life and in our self...

I saw a quote today which I loved: the three C's in life - making the Choice to take the Chances in life, so that Change happens. If we don't allow it to happen, it may just wait at out doorstep for a while and then leave... Let the change happens and let the ones who really deserve it, love you.
Just like in this very much loved song by Alanis Morisette - 'You've already won me over, in spite of me"... :-)

Warming sips of real life

And so it is... back to reality after three days of travel and leisure, of meeting nice people. Back to e-mails, to pending deadlines and tasks, to people who are away or with little time to spend about others, with even less affection to show about others.
Back to online life, to social networks, to talking about emotions rather than showing them, far from real life and real people with real emotions. How I wanted to never go back! That's my choice for today - more sips of real life... It could even be this as well.

This one is about pure pleasure

Spring has come and gone in Sofia few times in the last weeks. Cold mornings and evenings have been rotating with sunny warm afternoons when one wouldn't like to do anything like working in the dark office, but only enjoy their beer in the park, in the sun preferably. This is the time when the soul opens wide to the other souls around, and welcomes walks in the blossoming city gardens, evenings out with friends, socializing, social drinking, etc.
I was lucky enough to socialize during these weeks with a few friends whom I've never been so close before and some whom I've become very close in the last couple of years. And it was a pure pleasure! Feeling just like what I've felt when touching that wall of stones which appear to be soft :-)
We went out for drinks (not coffee, but a particular sort of wine - Cycle, by Minkovi Brothers, the purple label)
for sushi dinners - especially one of them was in a great great place, with these little origami cuties stretching down along the wall, decorating elegantly the white room and furniture:

We also spent an evening in the interactive video game corner - wow, my first time! and it was crazy:-)

I got drunk 4-5 times in three weeks, but that didn't bother me - spring has come and we enjoyed life as it is... great! And thank you for that March, people - I do love being with you :-)

The importance of being wrong

This blog was started about coffee, but there are some other things in life almost as important as coffee and coffee drinking - these are the choices we make everyday, the choices that in fact are our life. So I will allow myself to deal with them a little as well. This one is about being wrong and is inspired by a great TED talk which you can see here.
If we are to live, and not just exist, we need to make choices and take some action every single day of our lives. But the question that bothered me for a long time now, is how do people deal with the consequences of their choices. Especially if they were about interacting with other people. I've been raised under the philosophy 'try to be always right and the best'. And I've tried. And - not surprisingly - I failed in being always the best and the right.

In the race of making the best choices, with not enough time for healing the wounds in cases the decisions turned out to be wrong, I seemed to forgot that the consequences depended on other people as well... And on the choices they've made, the state of mind they are in. In my own mind they have been puppets whose strings were moved in ways I was able to predict. And believe me, many times my predictions were right (am I not a smartass?), but sometimes they were not - what a surprise! So... with the time, I've started to think about it more and more. And the question was - what have I done wrong? Because - obviously- I was the single maker of these wrong decisions with terrible consequences. Which is exactly what the woman in the TED link above mentions - if we do a wrong step, then there's something wrong with ourselves. This I accepted for a long time, but now I found out I'm asking myself the wrong question. I did what I've decided to do, what my personality and intuition considered the best to do. And that is me, that is the way I'm dealing with my life. No regrets (thanks, Robbie!)
If people react in ways that I didn't expect or predicted, then let it be. Unexpected results may lead us to new perspectives and - for sure - to new choices to make, new relations to develop or approach old relations in a brand new way. If it doesn't work, leave it behind and go on, I'd say (I'm sure a yoga guru would say it in a much better way but that's my blog, and that's my choice of words!). Be open to that and try to face the results with a friendly wink to the people involved. And be tolerant to your own choices. And drink only good-quality coffee. Oops, sorry, I was talking to myself here ;-)

Post-New Year posting...

While recovering from the food misuse during the four free days around New Year's Eve, I even managed to think a little. And - oh, so surprising! - the thoughts were about summarizing what has happened to me in 2010 (and the two years before it) and how it has changed me.
Luckily, I avoided the resolution part! I know it's always fake, people cheat themselves. As changing is not a one-time action, you can't just decide and become a new person. It is a constant effort, non-stop paying attention to all your decisions, each choice you make, еach line you say to others, each look and shoulder shrugging... But at the end - you are who you become after you've done all the choices and took all the decisions - right or wrong. You just need to make the best out of the mistakes you've made.
Why I've started thinking about these things on the morning of Jan 2? May be because I've met during the holidays friends who have reached happiness in life although life has been tough on them. They have tried again and again, fell and stand up again, got drunk and sober afterwards, got lost and found themselves, lost loved ones, have been betrayed or cheated...and still, these (non-)ordinary people have found their happiness and achieved their main goals in life - would it be love or family or enterprise..They found themselves. I'm proud of them! Cheers!
Here is some support to my idea by a well-known thinker - enjoy it!