Wednesday, October 24, 2012

I'm not sure what just happened


I was walking along the street Yogyakarta – a city I didn’t know existed until a week ago – and decided that I wanted to get some coffee as I have been known to do.  I walk into this (suspiciously) nice-looking coffee shop.  The interior of the place looked super clean, even by western standards – for comparison, I had lunch a couple of hours earlier sitting on a plastic stool at a place with no door.  There were black marble tables and each one had a computer.  Also strange: there didn’t seem to be an espresso maker or even a regular coffee machine.  The place was empty except for two men talking quietly in a dark corner and four (suspiciously) well-dress servers.  Now, at this point, the smart thing to do would probably have been to leave, so naturally, I walked up to the counter and looked at the menu.  The menu had maybe 10 things on it; all of which cost less than a dollar, which made me question why they had multiple signs up saying they accept all major credit cards since 95% of the places I’ve been to in Indonesia don’t accept credit cards at all.  As the server nervously waited, I ordered a coffee with milk.  I sit down at a table for a good 10 minutes as the servers busied themselves with work unrelated to making my coffee when a guy walks in from outside with a black plastic bag that looked like it contained a cup of some sort.  A couple of minutes after the guy bought the bag behind the counter, a server magically appears with a coffee.  I slowly sip the strange-tasting coffee and scanned the room.  A little while later a woman walks in holding a slip of paper that she hands over to the cashier, who in turn hands her a tightly wrapped box.  The woman then leaves and gives me a strange look as she walks out (maybe she’s never seen anyone drinking coffee there before?).  I finish the strange-tasting coffee because I like to make poor decisions and leave the place as confused as ever.

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