Coffee

I think I’m long overdue to write this blog post 😀 I’m sure many of you know I like my coffee. To me it is kind of like soul food. It makes my mornings worth getting up for. In Finland, where I was born and grew up, coffee is a stable part of every day life. If someone comes to visit you, the first thing you do is make a pot of coffee. I remember my mother teaching me how to make coffee in a percolator when I was very young, and I’d used to make it for her on weekend mornings before she woke up.

In Finland we had coffee for every occasion, Christmas, Easter, Sunday, even evening coffee! So you could say it is in my blood. But my true love for it has developed through traveling in the past 15 or so years. As a musician it becomes a bit of a startup fuel. To dull the boredom at a long drive, you get a coffee at every petrol station pit stop.

As you can imagine, I am used to drinking any kind of coffee, even the bad ones 😀 Now straight out the gates I can tell you I am not a fan of instant coffee. To me it tastes artificial… And yeah, I have tried every one of those fancy instants that promise you real coffee taste and I have been disappointed every time 😀

But lets forget about me for a second 😉 Coffee has a long history throughout cultures and more often than not, it is associated with socializing. It used to be something we did not just rush in to us in the morning on our way to work, but we stopped to have coffee and a chat with friends. This was the way it was enjoyed throughout the Arab world and still is. This is the way the coffee shops in Vienna served it, where once you purchased a cup of coffee, they would let you stay as long as you liked. If you go to the countryside in France, you’ll find cafe full of old men sipping and talking away, same all around the mediterranean. When I came to Ireland eighteen years a go, the concept of coffee shop was a new one. The Bewley’s cafe was the place to go. Now Dublin have some of the best coffee around, and most coffee shops are buzzing all through the day.

So I think it would be beneficial for us once in a while take a break from our busy schedule, grab a friend and take them for a coffee. Or even just on your own, sit down for few minutes in your favourite cafe and enjoy the coffee, instead of running off to work. Those few minutes lost is not the thing you will regret late in your life, it is the constant rushing. Teach your self to appreciate these small pleasures of life.

J.P.

The author J.P. Kallio is a singer songwriter
To get EIGHT of his songs for free go HERE