I’m lucky enough to do a lot of my work via my laptop, so I’ve been looking around for a local coffeeshop with wifi. I’ve been shopping around, and discovered that Borders, Barnes&Noble and Starbucks all charge for internet. (I don’t know if this is a new worldwide trend or if I’m just spoiled by the free wifi in Chinese Starbucks but it’s pretty lame either way.)

Stick and I are fond of Caribou Coffee for the drive-though, mostly because we love Caribou’s Eli. He is wide awake when we aren’t. Also he uses complete sentences in the drive-through.

Then I discovered The Chocolate Bean. The Chocolate Bean looks a bit like Cafe Zarah in Beijing, with the monochrome modern furniture, but without the odd sandwiches, and with a gourmet chocolate counter and a gelato bar like this one we visited in Rome. It’s like a hip living room.

I’m not a coffee purist. I know some people think that adding hazelnut and caramel and amaretto and so forth dilutes the flavour of the beans, and to those people, I say, hello? Do you not realize you can drink coffeedrink desserts all day? You are SO missing out! Anyway, the Chocolate Bean has a long list of specialty coffees or you can add flavors to regular drinks.  In the interests of a fair review, of course, I had to try a bunch of coffees, and the boring Americano is nice too, but a cappuccino with hazelnut is definitely my favorite. The prices are better than Starbucks, too.

The Chocolate Bean doesn’t have Caramel Apple Crack but they do have my beloved pomegranate green tea, New York-texture bagels (not bread with a hole in the middle), and smoothies. Did I mention the gelato? Very Meg-friendly!

Overall, good coffee and snacks in a laid-back atmosphere. The only way it could be any better is if it didn’t look out over the parking lot.  Now, I think I was supposed to be getting some work done…

Edit 4/23: The Chocolate Bean will start offering paninis in May! Can’t decide if I should get them with smoothies like this Xidan cafe, or with gelato like our old favorite, Andiamo’s in Amherst.

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The Chocolate Bean

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Stick and I aren’t coupon people. Buy one, get one often turns into buy one, throw away the other when it goes bad. Sometimes we miss coupons because the fine print catches us up. Oh, it’s not fifty cents off, it’s 50 cents off when you buy 2 gallons of Gatorade, a loaf of pumpernickel bread and a pineapple. And still more often, coupons languish on the mail board, or in my other purse, or in the reusable grocery bag I remember to bring about half the time.

We also ought to be banned from buying avocados, as I can never catch that minute between green, alligator-skinned rocks and smooshy mess, and I feel ridiculously wasteful every time I throw them away. We were better off in China, when we would carry our avocados and gouda back from Jenny Lou’s, and then wait, checking the avocados for that perfect sandwich ripeness each time before we went out for dumplings.

But the local grocery store finally had a promotion we could use. Buy 6 gallons of milk, get the 7th one free. This is a particularly good promo because all we had to do was not lose the milk tickets, plus, we had a couple months to go through 6 gallons. I always drank milk but that year in Yantai without any really made me appreciate cold skim milk. I was so pleased to see milk in the Vanguard in Beijing (um, before we knew about melamine, obviously). Anyway, going through six gallons in a couple months isn’t hard.

The other night, mere hours before the promotion expired, we got our seventh free gallon, and since then, Stick has been inordinately proud of our free milk. He might have even done a little dance of success in the supermarket.  When I’m cooking, he wants to know if my recipe requires any Victory Milk. He can’t walk past the kitchen without asking if I’d like a glass of Victory Milk.

I would rather be traveling again, but life with Stick is good everywhere.

From the blog Simpson's Paradox, please comment here:

Victory Milk

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Hutong Kitchen

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The waitress comes out with the plate, steaming hot, mouth-watering. Your nose picks up the intense aroma. The flavors. You’re seething

Then she places it…IN THE CENTER OF THE FRICKEN TABLE!

Your date immediately ploughs into it as if they haven’t had a meal in weeks. They hoover every inch of the plate within seconds graciously leaving you two bites to enjoy. Your life is now over.

Food is put in the center and it doesn’t matter how much you LIKE IT, if you have a party of 6, you won’t get more than 3 bites of it. The procedure isn’t always like this but it does happen, and as a lover of all things delicious – it makes me sad.

May I suggest some Yanjing beer to dull the pain, Nate?

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Orient-ation

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But I actually met Heather via her blog, Heather’s Feel Good Revolution, which I’d been reading for a while, and trading comments and emails, until the other day when I made fun of Fengtai, and she mentioned that she also lives at the outskirts of the city, in a lovely little complex called Yihai. And people tell me nothing good comes from my sarcastic remarks! Ha!

Anyway, we met up on Sunday evening and they introduced us to a lovely cafe in Xidan, where Stick and I were delighted to find panini and smoothies. We’ve really been missing Andiamo’s, an awesome sandwich and gelato shop back in Amherst, so it was perfect. (I plan to return the favor by introducing them to Biteapitta.) It was great to talk with those two, they seem to be in a similar place along the China comfort continuum, from jet-lagged gap-year newbies to the long-term crowd, with their Mandarin and cultural fluency.

“This was a good weekend, Meg,” Stick said, once we were back home with a beer. “Can you get me some more friends off the internet?”

From the blog Simpson's Paradox, please comment here:

Feel-Good Revolution

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