CONFESSIONS OF A COFFEECIONADO (Starring our Favorite Green Siren & Alamid)

• Its official: the days of coasting through work, heading home for Mommy’s staple dinners (consisting normally of crispy fried food, salads and Knorr soup) and afterwards finding the next couple of hours splurged on serious relaxation and “cushy planning” is as dead as the Kiwi bird and Milli Vanilli.  Competing events, obligations and preparations for work, wedding and post-nuptial life have been chewing at our sanities and ripping apart our schedules the past few weeks; We are juggling our work and wedding dues/payments, with regular meetings with the contractor working out an “affordable” but suave design for our condo.  Each day, we chance upon a fantastic interior design, an accent piece, or a room worth having, and we remind ourselves most of them are eye-candy.  Just eye-candy that we can imitate with a far smaller budget. Hehe!  Its financial overkill, but we’re looking to survive everything with a smile

• It’s a healthy dose of insanity and a necessary mind-bending process we suppose…but surely, there are times we miss our less-than-haggard days, and our spend-foolish ways.

• Last year, in view of our need to save up for significant wedding expenses, we reluctantly gave up luxurious dinners that used to be bi-weekly affairs for us during our first 6 months together (we’ve only been together for about 16 ½ months).  Despite the evidence plastered all over Facebook or on this site throughout 2010, yes, a hella LOT of restraint went into our practical ban of 5-course dinners, 8oz-Wagyus and stellar gastronomic delights wherever we could find them…

• .…this year, Debbie Downer meets Patrick Ality (um, practicality).  For an engaged couple taking pride in our self-styled ChocFrappe alias, we’ve “lessened” our propensity to down that Sexy, Mighty Frappe.  That is, we don’t spend as much time at Starbucks (and other well-lit brands) as we used to/want to – even if either of us are a couple of minutes away from a branch.  It’s among the colder, more implacable realities we’ve had to contend with since 2011 decided to come around in its full, unclothed and very costly glory. We’ve vacillated about the “Decision” several times over, and vacillate about it still.  Albeit a silly compromise allows us to “sit, sip and talk for a while” at any Starbucks on a Friday, Saturday and a Sunday.  And of course, to helpings of bread and cheesecake.  Ha-ha, take that, pragmatism!!!
 

In our element, with our ever-favorite green siren :)

• We’ve never viewed Starbucks as just a “coffee shop,” or a decidedly expensive gourmet café for gourmands like many others like us; Starbucks is that third place closest to home, inasmuch that a Chuck Taylor or Levi’s is for sneakers and jeans. The brand has accomplished this: made the feeling of “home” – or some resolved nostalgia – equidistant to anybody and everybody who’s been situated near a similarly-styled café.  You maybe drinking a hazelnut latte at an international airport, around the bend, across the subway, outdoors on a sunny day, indoors on a rainy afternoon, while sharing gossip/ridicules with friends and officemates, or with a book, I-Pad or your fiancée on a dormant evening – that unmistakable green Siren-with-flowing-locks will for us always imbue that familiar calm.  Watch the lights of buses and trains and cars flicker from a window seat, or casually leaf through a high-gloss, urban-flavored magazine as fellow customers pass-in and out of your peripheries like an adagio rolling over a Vivaldi overture. Its all the same: Starbucks will have a space for you, one cup at a time. 

• I couldn’t imagine spending more than an hour in McDonalds when I’m gaining nothing but a circuitous, insoluble fixation with Grimace, his specie, sex, and origin.  Quite the opposite, we once spent 5-hours at Starbucks in Camp John Hay, sharing a single Frappuccino. Grande-sized.  We hardly lifted our asses from a cool window seat that stared at the still-beauty of towering pine trees.  And that ranks as among the most lucid and magnifico moments during the Baguio trip.

• We never posed to be coffee critics, especially as we share a distaste for dark-as-sin brewed coffee; but we do embrace today’s inflated coffee-culture in the same way we’ve always enjoyed our cups of iced latte and mocha frappes coated in chocolate drizzle and a thick layer of whipped cream over the past 10 years.  Gourmet cafes such as Starbucks, CBTL (The Ultimate Mocha) and Gloria Jeans (Macadamia and Irish Crème chillers) deserve their fanfare because they offer the best-tasting chilled coffee-based drinks out there. Simply put. 

with Gabby's favorite, self-styled iced tall latte w/three squirts of Hazelnut syrup, whipped cream, chocolate drizzle and cocoa powder-- slightly stirred not blended.. whew!!!!

•     Might it be time to look for pet civets in the black market, and accordingly purchase a parcel of coffee-bearing land in Benguet?? Civets – locally called “Alamid” –  are weasel/mongoose-like tree-loving critters, and they’ve earned this winning reputation of having coffee fruits in their day-to-day diet.  Then their stomachs ferment the coffee, which they later dispel (defecate) out in gooey, beany filaments.  Farmers and local foragers in upland areas collect these civet crap from the forest floor and through a process are able to extract among the “most expensive coffee beans” in Asia.  We saw civet coffee once being sold at Sonya’s Garden, a 300g bag sold for nearly a thousand pesos!! We want our civet farm too!!!

•     Speaking of the mountainous provinces, Cordillera Coffee in UP Diliman, and the Riverbanks, we hear, serves great coffee as well.