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Take two hours to drink a single espresso

While living in France, I got used to this idea that an espresso is not about filling your blood up with caffeine, but about the experience of sitting at a café and enjoying the company of the person you are with, or if alone taking your time reading a book. As such, you order just one single espresso and take as much as several hours to slowly sip your way through it.

Obviously this means that you are essentially sipping a cool drink most of the time; it doesn’t matter though, as its purpose is just an excuse to sit down at this café.

This contrasts strongly with France’s neighbours, the Italians who frequently drink an espresso as if it were a shot and throw it back. Or with North Americans who drink coffee because they want to fill their blood up with caffeine, and as such many places there present an espresso or coffee in general in a hideous plastic cup.

I don’t drink coffee except socially or when I want to sit down at a café to study or read (never to wake up in the morning for instance), but when I do order a coffee it’s always an espresso in a nice little cup and it always takes me forever to drink it. Long lunches with French co-workers reminded me that the rest of us tend to be in way too much of a hurry when we sit down to eat or drink, making it too functional about getting those liquids and solids plonked into your stomach acids as soon as possible.

11. Nuke 700 friends

As part of my continued attempt to truly integrate and understand a local culture, my attempts to make friends in the Netherlands required so much lateral thinking, that I had a philosophical break-down of sorts on what the concept of friendship truly means.

Their circle of friends tends to be so tight, that it’s incredibly hard to break into it, especially if you don’t work or study with Dutch people. People I’d meet in parties that we were both attending downright refused to hang out with me any time later. A narrow-minded traveller would conclude that they are assholes and leave it at that (and sadly, most foreigners who live in Amsterdam tend to have very few local friends), but I couldn’t do this as I needed to improve my Dutch and was there specifically to find out what makes Dutch people tick.

Despite the fact that I was only there for eight weeks, I took this investigation of how to make friends so seriously that it broke down the very fabric of what the concept of to have a friend meant for me. I eventually succeeded in getting into someone’s inner circle, but the price was that now it was too late to go back and this new understanding of friendship had infiltrated my brain permanently.

Now, I simply cannot seriously call someone a friend unless we genuinely know one another, or are part of some tight community.

Because of this, one of the first things I did in my transition to being stricter on who I call a friend, was to go into Facebook and nuke 700 people that I had added by meeting once in passing, or classmates from school I didn’t really know, or even an old friend who I had lost touch with for too long. The number of Facebook friends I have oscillates between 60 and 90 now, and I do regular spring cleaning to keep the number low.



I really can’t go back; to me the concept of having almost a thousand “friends” seems ludicrous and I roll my eyes every time I get a friend request from someone I barely know, or don’t know at all. Of course, I have a public setting on my Facebook page that people are welcome to follow, because I select updates and certain information to be either public or private, but why would I want to share some personal events in my life with someone I don’t know?

Unfortunately, this Dutch view of appreciating “true” friendships more than call absolutely everyone you come across a friend (rather than an acquaintance which is more accurate), doesn’t jive with the rest of the world well at all.

Some people have gotten very offended that I haven’t accepted their friend request, taking it almost like a personal insult, when ironically I am equally insulted that they have 2,000 “friends” and have no standards whatsoever on who they count as one. It’s even more frustrating because people have a stereotype of travellers having nothing but superficial friends that they cast on me, the hypocrisy of which boils my blood when coming from someone with four digits of people in their network that they can’t possibly know.


Date: 2015-02-16; view: 715


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