Black charcoal rainbow latte ♥️♥️
But soon they’re open for take away, and we can have our aesthetic coffee back ♥️
Tag Archives: coffee
Places to sit
My two favourite places to sit and work in the city:
1. The library in Nürnberg consists of two buildings, linked by a super confusing system of corridors and stairs. The new part is a tall building, extremely ugly from the outside, but modern and bright on the inside. The old part however, is some kind of old monestary I think? The floor is covered in old carpet and the ceilings are lower, it smells kinda weird sometimes, but it has a courtyard where the trees are still bright yellow and orange, and a café on the lowest floor with dark wooden furniture that makes you feel like you’re a professor at a british university. I like it. Last time I was there I dragged a chair to one of the windows overlooking the courtyard and I used the broad windowsill as my desk. It’s a good place to sit.
2. I know Starbucks has long ago reached that point where it’s too annoyingly popular to be cool. But I appreciate their culture. If I go to a cozy german café they will expect me to actually appreciate it, and be aware of my surroundings, and not stay for like three hours just sitting in front of my computer. Starbucks though, they don’t care, they expect that, and there’s not even any staff on the second floor most of the time. I just sit there being oblivious of where I am for a while, but I have coffee or hot chocolate and the buzz of movement around me. It calms me down when I’m too unfocused to work from home.
🖤
Berlin
I feel like I’ve almost posted a trilogy about Germany, but I’ve now travelled through three cities there so I guess that makes sense.
After Nürnberg and Augsburg I went to Berlin.
Actually I met up with my dad and brother there. Walked into an airconditioned hotel lobby and saw my dad get out of the elevator to greet me, and it was weird. It’s weird when you’re not travelling with your family, and suddenly they show up in some random country. I knew they were gonna be there of course, and thank God for that since otherwise I have no idea how I would have actually gotten home, but it’s still out of place somehow, like family is isolated to specific family vacations and home.
Anyway, it was nice. We rented little electric scooters for a bit and drove through Berlin.
And we found like the most amazing cafés. Here’s the first one, a really fancy one called The Barn, with the kind of actual good coffee that I can’t really appreciate because I want it cold, with chocolate and caramel and two thirds milk. Did appreciate the view though.
But this one was my actual favourite. In the centre of Berlin, you turn around a corner and end up on this big, industrial looking side street. Some of the buildings around still have bullet holes in them. And then there’s this, little green hipster oasis, right there in the midst of it. I had some sort of “rose coffee cocktail” which honestly wasn’t that good, but I felt like it said a lot about the place. So a little bit pretentious maybe, but I still absolutely loved it. Sat there for like a couple of hours, writing letters and feeling cool. Hihgly recommend.
So that ended up being mostly about cafés. But honestly, I don’t mind and hope you don’t either.
Hugs♥️
The Tokyo Project
In a relatively new corner of the world wide web there’s a website called kofi. You could say that it belongs to a group of new websites, some of them not even that new, about crowdfunding and being – through the internet – supported by the very same people who enjoy your work.
Kofi works in the way that you buy someone a coffee, or, technically, you just click a button and 3 bucks are transferred to that person, they can use it however.
I want to use kofi to give away free coffee to people in Shibuya, Tokyo.
In the midst of, or rather right next to, the busiest intersection in the world, there’s a starbucks with a second floor seating area where tourists and locals can enjoy their coffee while looking at the endless stream of people passing by below. I went to Japan last year, and took some time to interview people there, because it’s one of my favourite places I’ve ever been. But this time I wanted to do something different.
I want to connect this virtual reality where everything is buttons and icons, and we sometimes forget that there’s even a person on the other side of the profiles, with the very tangible, physical reality. Don’t get me wrong, there’s beauty in the virtual just as there is in the physical, but it is – above all else – interesting when they meet.
I want someone to be able to sit in front of their computer in America and click a button, and for it to cause me to buy and actual cup of coffee that I’ll give to an actual person out on the street. There’s nothing abstract about that, real cardboard cups and caffeine and money.
This project is a study in two areas I find endlessly fascinating. First of all, different realities versus each other. In this case, the collision and connection of physical and virtual reality. The transformation of something virtual into something “real”. And also the connection and collision between the physical and spiritual. I think acts of generosity change the atmosphere of an area and around a person. And the second area: The great exhange. The way in which we all link up and the constant exhange that is happening, always, whether it comes to money and business or services or compliments. If you’re stingy, no one seems to have enough, but the more generous you are and the more you step into the great exhange, the more you’ll notice it. We’re starting something.
So for now this is just an idea, but when it happens, or well, when I do it, I’ll invite you to virtually give a random person in the Shibuya crossing a fresh cup of coffee.
My NaNoWriMo survival kit!
As mentioned in my previous post, I’m gonna do NaNoWriMo this year! (Don’t know what it is? Check out http://nanowrimo.org/about). And for this month, there are a few things I’m definitely gonna need to survive, so I thought I’d share them with you. Without further ado;
NaNoWriMo survival kit
- Coffee, if you like coffee.
- Other stuff, if you like other stuff. Like tea, hot chocolate.. because writers DO NOT HAVE TO BE OBSESSED WITH COFFE. Seriously you guys.
- Kindness. This is why telling people about NaNoWriMo is a good thing. I usually don’t tell a lot of people, simply because I always have a thousand projects going on and I’m not the type of person who feels the need to share them all. But you want people to support you, people close to you, and obviously people in your home. Nothing beats an unexpected food tray on late evenings when your writing has made you forget the concept of eating anything else than words and sentences.
- Links to all the amazing writing tips and inspiration there is out there. I’m gonna write a post with all of my favourite links in a few days, and I’ll link it here, but for starters here’s at least my writing board on pinterest: http://www.pinterest.com/eiriaan/writing/
- Tools. Where will you write? In word? Scrivener? Maybe on actual paper? And even if you’re oh so modern and prefer everything digital, make sure that you actually own paper. Yes, that can still be useful, even in this day of age. I keep my journal, a simple, moleskine thing, with me everywhere I go. Seriously. I might take it with me if I’m just going upstairs, turning halfway up the stairs because I forgot it. Also, art stuff can be fun if you’re into that, if you like to for example draw your character designs.
- Music. If that’s your thing. Compile a few playlists, maybe different ones for different moods? Personally, I prefer silence. I can’t even study while listening to music. Sometimes, with very particular songs, it can work. Or if the volume’s so low I can barely hear it. Or maybe if it is the song that inspired that certain paragraph. Some things I like to have on low volume though, or maybe listen to while thinking about the story, is the playlist Creativity Boost from spotify, and this video on youtube! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShI_fv38qYQ
- A cage. Where you can lock away every part of you that screams about grammar, structure and actual good writing. NaNoWriMo is not about that, and the faster you realize it the better. It’s about getting a rough draft out on paper. To find out what your story is actually about. Remember that you’re.. what is it they say? Let me google it.. right, this: “I’m writing a first draft and reminding myself that I’m simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles.” -Shannon Hale
Happy writing!
eirians 