Annie Chang/Staff

Being an avid coffee drinker, my goal is to try coffee from every country I visit, and international coffees in the States also easily grab my attention. When Semih, a dear Turkish friend of mine, asked me if I wanted to experience Turkish coffee one night at 11 p.m., I desperately wished I could — but, of course, that would mean no sleep that night. A couple of days later, I headed over to try the coffee that was constantly on my mind. Little did I know, drinking Turkish coffee had its own little ritual.

Semih began to make the coffee as soon as I entered his apartment, and I immediately started snapping photos. I was very interested, and everything grabbed my attention. He added a pure powdery coffee into hot water that was sitting in a cezve, a small copper Turkish coffee pot that makes about two espresso-sized cups of coffee. Traditionally, the cezve is held over flames and embers, but because his apartment only had an electric stove, he just rested the cezve on that. After a couple of minutes, Semih added some sugar into the coffee. He told me that it depends on personal preference: Some people drink it black, and some like it with sugar. He heated the mixture of coffee and hot water until it boiled and said that if it was done perfectly and taken off the stove the second it started to boil, there would be delicious coffee foam at the top of the cup. No cream or flavoring was added after the coffee was poured into the cup, and it was an intense, dark color characteristic of a perfect cup of pure coffee. The taste was deliciously bitter, with an almost grassy or charcoal-like note that differed greatly from regular black coffee in the United States. The bitterness was so unique that to add more sugar or cream would have overpowered the coffee taste. After drinking the coffee, we ate pieces of Turkish dessert, a type of starch gel and sugar with different flavors and pistachios or fruit jelly inside.

Then it was time for fortune-telling, in which the saucer is turned upside down and placed on top of the coffee cup. This combination is circled clockwise three times and then flipped over, so that the saucer faces up and the cup is upside-down on the saucer. A coin is placed on the cup to make it cool faster. The point is to leave the coffee residue in the cup so that it forms ambiguous patterns. My intrigued self could barely wait to see my fortune. Here’s what Semih told me:

-  There was a large part of the cup that was white: I had a pure and innocent heart.
- He saw the figure of a bird: Someone would come visit me soon.
- There was something not so pretty in the shape of a dead fish: Something would scare me.
- A bit of leftover coffee would not stop running although we were not moving the cup, which was quite strange: I was easily led by others and convinced by them, and my opinions were easily swayed.

After the fortune-telling from the cup, it was the plate’s turn. He told me to make a wish before the fortune telling started, then allow one drop of coffee to run down the back of the plate. The speed of the drop represented how fast the wish would come true, and the closer it got to the middle of the plate, the more likely it would come true. Unfortunately, my wish would start to look like it was coming true, but it would not. Reminding myself that I am not superstitious, I was fascinated by the ritual and did not let the wish bother me. Many things were revealed, and I am waiting to see whether anything comes true.

Contact Annie Chang at achang@dailycal.org

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Maura Chen/Staff

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Watch a video with reviews of coffee shops in Berkeley by Fiona Hannigan. The coffee shops featured are Peet’s, Philz Coffee, Milano, Strada, Free Speech Movement, and Espresso Roma.

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“Coffeecoffeecoffee!”

This, dear readers, is one of the greatest lines ever spoken by Lorelai Gilmore, the fast-talking matriarch of the Gilmore Girls, as she walked up to the counter of the local cafe. It is also one of the three phrases that my old roommate and I would use to describe our relationship. Obviously, we are both coffee addicts, ever enabling — no, encouraging! — each other’s addiction and still squandering our money on complex cappuccino or latte orders when we meet up.

Since we are hyperambitious, hard-working and equally hard-partying Cal students, coffee is an integral part of many of our lives. Besides some other popular “means” of staying awake and extracting every possible second of productivity out of our days, coffee is pretty much what makes our college world go round.

Before coming to college, I was one of those vanilla-latte-at-the-mall-sipping girls who ordered only drinks that successfully masked the taste of coffee with a mixture of milk and sweet syrups. I’ll be honest: I can’t say that I was a real coffee drinker back then — that would be discrediting the true addicts. But after I arrived at Cal my freshman year, befriended my coffee-loving neighbor, displayed fantastic procrastination skills that cause late nights and all-nighters, and drank Bear Market’s low-quality coffee every day, my addiction became official.

I drink coffee all the time.

I drink it when I need to get my day started, or to get over the afternoon energy drop. I run to it when I need to stay up late — or all night. I grab a cup of it when I have a long walk ahead of me and want to hold something in my hand to keep me company.

I drink it when I need a place to study and camping out at a cafe without buying something just wouldn’t be right. I get another cup of it after I’ve been studying at that cafe for some hours already and need to justify my further patronage. I call upon it when I’m meeting up with someone and we need a mindless activity over which to chat, discuss or plan.

It’s just there. Waiting for me to order it (plain or in a special form), drink it, savor it, enjoy it. Sometimes it disappoints in taste — not all coffee is made the same — but it always fulfills whatever I ask from it, whether it’s an energy boost or just company on my table or in my hand. It’s like that loyal friend we all have: Though it may be moody now and then, it’s still always there for you.

True love.

Although I used to make a lot of coffee at home — obviously my old roommate and I had not only a coffee maker but also a stovetop espresso maker and a milk frother — getting fancy drinks or even just a plain ol’ cup o’ joe at a coffeeshop has always been part of my routine in college. Sometimes I grab ‘n go, but oftentimes I sit, drink, work and dilly-dally there.

As I’ve already mentioned, cafes often serve as my work den. I study, do homework, write papers and columns, work on group projects and a do whole lot of attempting to actually accomplish all these things while I sit in my favorite caffeinated establishments around campus.

Why?

Well, though I’ve had to do a fair amount of reading (liberal arts majors holla!) and some quantitative-type assignments in my day, I’ve had to do a whole lot of writing for class and for this marvelous publication.

And I need a place where I can clear my thoughts and put some hopefully amazing ones on paper — well, screen.

As Virginia Woolf argues in one of my all-time favorite books (read: long essay), A Room of One’s Own, what a woman writer needs in order to let her true writing genius out is an income and — you guessed it — a room of her own.

Enter the cafe.

It’s not exactly my own room, as loads of other people are there, but it still does the trick for me psychologically. It’s a space for me to plant myself, grab some liquid caffeine, do some people watching, attempt to order all the thoughts in my head and type up the next greatest piece of literature in the world — note the sarcasm, please.

So as Virginia speaks of private writing rooms where one can take refuge and crank out some genius, I have chosen to make my local coffee shops my writing rooms, though updated because I’m a college chick and cannot afford a private study room in some British manor. I’m still working on the income part of the female literary genius recipe though — hopefully my Cal degree is going to help with that.

And since I’m a social being, I get my loyal buddy, coffee, to keep me company while I “privately” write at cafes. It works out great.

So next time you ask yourself if having yet another cup of coffee is a good idea, let me give you the answer: yes. It always is. Do not be ashamed of your (established or impending) coffee addiction, and embrace its home: the coffee shop.

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Please sir, can I have some more?” Oliver Twist was just a small, blonde, English orphan with an empty metal bowl and a big dream. He ran out of gruel. He wanted more. So do I, and so, I postulate, do you. Allow me to explain.

Is it Thursday already? I’m having trouble keeping track of the days this week because I went into hibernation on Monday in a misguided attempt to avoid Valentine’s Day completely. I should have realized that this is impossible. No matter what your opinion is on Valentine’s Day, it cannot be ignored. It’s there, all red and pink and sickly sweet, sitting in the middle of your otherwise ordinary February week. You can love it, hate it, feign indifference to it, or refuse to celebrate it, but you have to acknowledge its existence. Even two days after Valentine’s Day, you’re bound to pick up a paper and see some schmuck still writing about this sorry excuse for a holiday.

Every year, Valentine’s Day leaves us with the lingering feeling that it is simply not okay to be alone. It makes us feel that there must be something missing from your life if you don’t have someone special in it; that being busy and happy and loving your friends and your family is not enough to fill the empty metal-bowl-shaped void — you need more. You need someone else to complete you.

This is my problem with Valentine’s Day. But obviously, as I am single, I am also bitter and jealous. There’s the Valentine’s Day trap, snapping shut around my ankles. You can’t say you hate it without seeming like a bitter spinster. You can’t admit you love it without seeming smug and loved-up. And you can’t insist you don’t care about it, really, not at all, because then it seems like you actually care quite a lot.

A few years ago, as I was recovering from a break-up, a friend of mine offered this comforting gem: “When you think about it,” he said, patting me soothingly on the shoulder, “ultimately, we’re all totally alone.” After I’d stopped sobbing and my friend found an icepack to press against the part of his face I had punched, I calmed down and realized that he might be right. We forge strong bonds with other people from birth and throughout our lives, but when it comes to the crunch, we have to fend for ourselves. We live in the center of our own small universes. We make our own decisions, create our own opportunities and plan our own parties. In many ways, we lead more isolated lives than any other generation before us, but as a society, we are still collectively obsessed with finding a partner. Why do we need the companionship of another person to make it all mean something? Surely it is totally possible to be happy all on your own?

Sadly, most heroes and heroines in the history of literature and cinema don’t seem to think so, and Valentine’s Day is just one more reminder that all the chocolate in the world won’t make the pain stop. I’ve tried to live a full and happy life without someone else by my side — really, I have, but sometimes I find it difficult to get out of bed in the mornings because there is no one there to share the experience, moment by sleepy, cranky moment. On Friday and Saturday nights, I like to stay at home and drink ferociously strong coffee while intermittently crying and working on my anthology of unrequited love poetry. (I’m going to call it “Hopeless Singles No Longer Wish to Mingle.”) I spent the 14th of February wandering distractedly around campus, cursing the blue California skies while wishing rain would fall to fill the gaping hole in my heart.

I often wonder: what’s it like out there in the big bad world when you have someone else beside you to guide you every step of the way? It’s really quite dangerous to be alone. I’m a rather clumsy person, and I dearly wish I had someone to catch me every time I fall over chairs or my own feet. I mean, one of these days I might hit my head and totally forget the last five years of my life, and I highly doubt Channing Tatum would bother to try and bring me back to the present.

As a child, I used to wear my nicest dress to the playground in the park on Valentine’s Day in the hope that a nice boy would ask me to marry him and that’d be the end of that. No more searching or yearning or any of the things we single people are supposed to do. These days, I know better than to try to pick up men in parks, and I refuse to let Valentine’s Day advertising tell me that there’s something missing in my life. I am happy and fulfilled just as I am. I refuse to believe that it is impossible to live happily ever after on your own. But in the end, my self affirmations are just not enough. Bah, humbug.

Like Oliver Twist, in the end, I still want more.

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